With urbanization and increasing unbalance of required space to availability, it is becoming imperative to provide open
ground storey in commercial and residential building. These provisions reduce the stiffness of the lateral load resisting system
and a progressive collapse becomes unavoidable in a severe earthquake for such buildings due to soft storey. Soft story behavior
exhibits higher stresses at the columns and the columns fail as the plastic hinges are not formed on predermined positions. Thus
the vulnerability of soft storey effect has caused structural engineers to rethink the design of a soft storey building. In the
current study the focus is on the seismic design of RC structure with soft storey at various level and finding out the way to
optimize it using different models and their comparison.
