MS 01 – Component Reuse in Structures and Infrastructures

Ornella Iuorio

University of Leeds
Leeds, UK

Corentin Fivet

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
(EPFL)
Fribourg, Switzerland

Circularity of structures and infrastructures are necessary to drastically reduce the carbon footprint of the built environment and respond to the intergovernmental requests for net zero housing. Innovative solutions in structural design, processes and materials are necessary to address circularity. Within the “reduce, reuse and recycle” paradigm this special session is specifically interested in understanding the impacts of component reuse in structures and infrastructures in their life cycle.
This session invites studies about: design for deconstruction, circularity through use/reuse of loadbearing elements, minimization of material use through structural optimization and construction-based design, adaptive structures and flexibility of use.

MS 02 – Smart Condition Assessment of Railway Bridges

Túlio Bittencourt

Universidade de São Paulo
São Paulo, Brazil

Rui Calçada

Universidade do Porto
Porto, Portugal

Diogo Ribeiro

Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto
Porto, Portugal

Hermes Carvalho

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Minas Gerais, Brazil

Marcos Massao

Universidade de São Paulo
São Paulo, Brazil

Pedro Montenegro

Universidade do Porto
Porto, Portugal

In recent years, important investments have been made in the construction of new railway lines, as well as in the rehabilitation and upgrading of existing lines. Many of these lines include a significant number of bridges, viaducts and other critical infrastructures whose operational and safety conditions have to be preserved by the infrastructure managers during life cycle. Recent scientific and technological advancements have enabled a more efficient structural condition assessment of railway bridges, mainly through the implementation of intelligent strategies for the inspection, monitoring, maintenance and risk management. Within the framework outlined above, this special session aims to bring together from across the world the latest research studies, findings and achievements with regard to the smart condition assessment of railway bridges. Theoretical, experimental and computational investigations (or a combination of these) are welcome. Expected papers will cover various topics related to: structural integrity; structural condition assessment; digital twins; model calibration and validation; structural health monitoring; new sensors and technologies (photogrammetry, laser scanning, drones, wireless); computer vision techniques; automated damage identification; remote inspection strategies; BrIM (Bridge Information Modelling); Big Data; Artificial Intelligence (supervised and unsupervised learning); augmented reality; virtual reality; disaster risk reduction; emergency management and intelligent asset management.

MS 03 – Integrating Life-Cycle Engineering Concepts into Community Resilience and Decision-Support

John van de Lindt

Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO, USA

Jamie Padgett

Rice University
Houston, TX, USA

Andre R. Barbosa

Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR, USA

Nisrine Makhoul

Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy

Resilience quantification focuses on the performance assessment, including spatial and temporal recovery, of systems and communities following exposure to punctuated stressors, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, as well as chronic stressors, such as those associated with climate change, shifting demands, or aging and deterioration of systems. Thus, the temporal cycle of resilience includes mainly four capabilities which are: 1) to plan/prepare before the occurrence of the hazard event/stressor, 2) to absorb the shock and stress generated by the event, 3) to recover from the incident or phenomenon, and 4) adapt to the threats and deduce future improvement lessons. Traditional resilience studies work across different levels/scales, i.e., component, structural, network, infrastructure, system, city levels, etc., and consider interdependencies between the levels under multiple hazards analyses, which are often scenarios. Community resilience typically extends such assessments to capture socio-economic influence on the temporal resilience process, aiming for a more realistic representation and improvement of the decision-making process.
Life-cycle engineering traditionally focuses on the temporal progression of structural performance and life-cycle costs, and was broadened to include sustainability indicators and more recently to tackle life-cycle resilience. However, new concepts and methods are required to adequately capture interactions in various life-cycle phases when quantifying life-cycle resilience or consider impacts across different temporal and spatial scales. Furthermore, traditional life-cycle studies do not always consider the socio-economic interactions within the engineering resilience models, as required for extending these notions to the community scale. Therefore, this session is dedicated to investigating the mechanisms being explored and applied around the world to integrate the Life-cycle Engineering concepts, modeling, and tools into Community Resilience and associated Decision-Support. The session covers physics-based approaches, data-driven approaches such as machine learning, as well as artificial intelligence.

MS 04 – Vibration-Based Structural Health Monitoring, Damage Identification and Residual Lifetime Estimation

Edwin Reynders

KU Leuven
Leuven, Belgium

Geert Lombaert

KU Leuven
Leuven, Belgium

Eleni Chatzi

ETH Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland

Costas Papadimitirou

University of Thessaly
Thessaly, Greece

A main goal of vibration-based structural health monitoring and damage identification is assess structural condition via vibration signatures. For civil structures response-only data is often used due to difficulties associated with forced excitation of large structures. This followed by inference of grey/black-box models, or updating of physics-based models. This mini-symposium welcomes novel contributions on vibration-based structural health monitoring, damage identification and parameter, input and load estimation, using black-box as well as physics-based models. Relevant topics include linear and nonlinear system identification, parameter and state estimation, model updating and correlation, optimal experiment design, and the exploration of novel sensing techniques.

MS 05 – Life-Cycle Performance Assessment of Civil Engineering Systems

Mitsuyoshi Akiyama

Waseda University
Tokyo, Japan

Dan M. Frangopol

Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA, USA

Hiroshi Matsuzaki

National Defense Academy
Yokosuka, Japan

Despite extensive studies on life-cycle performance assessment of structure and infrastructure, a number of issues still remain unclear. One of the main intricacies is the uncertainty associated with the physical parameters involved in the problem. Because of the presence of uncertainties, long-term structural performance must be predicted based on probabilistic concepts and methods, and life-cycle reliability assessment methodologies must be established.
The aim of this Mini-Symposium is to attract state-of-the-art papers that deal with the use of advanced computational and/or experimental techniques for evaluating the life-cycle performance of aging structures in an aggressive environment. For these structures, multiple environmental and mechanical stressors lead to deterioration of structural performance. Such deterioration will reduce their service life and increase the life-cycle cost associated with maintenance actions. This Mini-Symposium covers current theoretical and experimental efforts made in the assessment and future prediction of performance, maintenance and strengthening of existing structures in an aggressive environment. The following topics would be addressed:

– Long-term deterioration model of structural performance
– Visual inspection or advanced structural health monitoring techniques
– Life-cycle analysis of aging structures based on reliability approach
– Updating the reliability of existing structures by incorporating inspection results
– Related topics with laboratory or field experiments on aging structures
– Machine learning approach to life-cycle performance assessment of aging structures

MS 06 – Smart Maintenance and AI Applications

Hitoshi Furuta

Osaka Metropolitan University
Osaka, Japan

Necati Catbas

University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL, USA

Yasutoshi Nomura

Ritsumeikan University
Shiga, Japan

In recent years, it is important and emergent how to efficiently and accurately assess the structural integrity. To save maintenance load and cost, a great attention has been paid to smart maintenance and AI and data science. Smart maintenance includes nondestructive tests such as ultrasonic, electromagnetic, laser, and radar technologies, and image processing. In this session, we will discuss the applicability and actual applications of Artificial Intelligent, Intelligent Systems and Data science to the infrastructure problems such as inspection monitoring and maintenance. The possible topics of interest in this session include but are not limited to machine learning or deep learning techniques, Bayesian approach, structural health monitoring and smart maintenance techniques, among others.

MS 07 – Non-Deterministic Model Updating for Structural Health Monitoring of Existing Structures

Masaru Kitahara

Leibniz University Hannover
Hannover, Germany

Matteo Broggi

Leibniz University Hannover
Hannover, Germany

Michael Beer

Leibniz University Hannover
Hannover, Germany

Takeshi Kitahara

Kanto Gakuin University
Yokohama, Japan

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) aims to identify deterioration in existing structures at early stages, which will benefit their life-cycle management. Model updating has been developed as a key technique for SHM, where the parameters or the numerical model itself are calibrated to tune its prediction close to the measurements. However, inevitable uncertainties arise in both the experiments and modeling, which leads to the necessity of non-deterministic approaches for treating the uncertainties. This Mini-Symposium is dedicated to gathering experts from both academia and industries to showcase the latest development on the uncertainty treatment for model updating and SHM. A non-exhaustive list includes stochastic/interval model updating, mixed aleatory and epistemic uncertainty modeling, uncertainty quantification, and data assimilation.

MS 08 – Resilience and Sustainability of Steel based Hybrid Building Structures in the Life-Cycle Environment

Dan Dubina

Romanian Academy
Timisoara, Romania

Florea Dinu

Politehnica University of Timisoara
Timisoara, Romania

Viorel Ungureanu

Politehnica University of Timisoara
Timisoara, Romania

Enhancing resilience of built infrastructure against natural and man-made hazards is one of the main goals in our society. While resilience can have many components, two are of importance when structural systems are envisaged, i.e., the capacity to resist the hazard, or robustness, and the ability to recover from the hazard, which means affordable costs and low duration. These two components are very much dependent on the technical aspects applied before (design concepts and methodologies) and after the disaster (retrofit/repair intervention) and are not yet integrated in practice. Moreover, the capacity to adapt (for further demands) and to integrate the components, elements, or whole structures in the circular economy concept must become part of the design process. On this purpose, the Special Session aims to highlight the meaning and quantify the relative importance of each component of the Resilience for Lightweight Hybrid Building Structures.
The Special Session will be jointly organized by the Romanian Academy, Timisoara Branch, in cooperation with Politehnica University Timisoara and European Convention for Constructional Steelwork, TC14 – Sustainability & Eco-Efficiency of Steel Construction.
The general topic refers to Hybrid Building Structures, in principle composed by steel sections, combined with other construction materials, applied both for main structural systems and secondary components (walls, cladding, roofing etc.). The following main topics will be considered:

  • Resilience of seismic resistant building structures under multi-hazard environment;
  • Seismic reliability building structures designed using fuse members & recentering capacity;
  • Life Cycle Assessment of Life Cycle/Life Cost assessment of deteriorating structures and components considering climate change and extreme loading events;
  • Design strategies for adaptable building systems in circular economy context;
  • Sustainability limit states for maintenance and repair of existing structures;
  • Resilience of modular multi-story steel buildings under extreme loading events.

MS 09 – Recent Development IoT- and ICT-Based Infrastructure Inspection and Management

Chul-Woo Kim

Kyoto University
Kyoto, Japan

Vasilis Sarhosis

University of Leeds
Leeds, UK

Mohammad Noori

California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA, USA

Yi Zhang

Tsinghua University
Beijing, China

Although adoption of structural health monitoring (SHM) approaches is on the rise, despite significant research activities, SHM technologies have not yet been widely accepted by working level officials especially those in infrastructure inspection and management; this is caused by few satisfactory results in real-world applications. However, recent fast-growing technologies on IoT and ICT have immense potential to be incorporated into the successful real-world application of SHM to the infrastructure inspection and maintenance. The scope of this mini-symposium is to bring together experts, academics and practicing engineers concerned with the various aspects of SHM incorporated with technologies of IoT and ICT.

MS 10 – Advances in Life-Cycle Earthquake Engineering

Luca Capacci

Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy

Mitsuyoshi Akiyama

Waseda University
Tokyo, Japan

Fabio Biondini

Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy

Dan M. Frangopol

Lehigh University
Bethlehem, PA, USA

Seismic risk assessment of structures and infrastructure systems is a topical research field in earthquake engineering. Part of the built environment has been designed with obsolete seismic provisions. The vulnerability of critical structures can be further exacerbated by long-term deterioration phenomena as well as natural and/or human-made hazards. Classical time-invariant approaches to seismic analysis should be revised to explicitly incorporate life-cycle concepts into design, assessment, management and emergency response of civil infrastructure systems and interdependent lifelines. This Special Session is intended to present novel analytical models, advanced numerical strategies, experimental testing, innovative design procedures and retrofit interventions in the field of seismic vulnerability, exposure, risk, and assessment of structures and infrastructure systems with a life-cycle-oriented approach. Topics include but are not limited to:

  1. Assessment of interdependencies between seismic and other hazards affecting over time the behavior of structural systems, such as environmental aging (e.g., corrosion and fatigue) and mechanical damage accumulation (e.g., mainshock-aftershock sequences).
  2. Novel numerical techniques for calibration of time-variant seismic fragility models under uncertainty exacerbated by multiple hazards.
  3. Assessment of the effectiveness of maintenance, strengthening, retrofit, rehabilitation, repair and any other proactive or reactive interventions for life-cycle seismic hazard mitigation.
  4. Definition of lifetime performance indicators for assessment of seismic vulnerability, exposure, risk, reliability, functionality, resilience, robustness, redundancy, among others.
  5. Formulation of life-cycle mathematical optimization frameworks for optimal infrastructure management and resource allocation, regarding both ex-ante planning and ex-post interventions.

MS 11 – Life-Cycle Asset Management and the Complexity of Socio-Environmental-Technical Transitions

Andreas Hartmann

University of Twente
Twente, The Netherlands

Marcel Hertogh

Delft University of Technology
Delft, The Netherlands

Jaap Bakker

Rijskwaterstaat
Utrecht, The Netherlands

Han Roebers

Province Noord-Holland
Haarlem,  The Netherlands

In the forthcoming decades many objects in transport infrastructure networks will come to the end of their technical, economical or functional lifespan. These assets were designed and built under social, technological and environmental requirements that were substantially different from the ones today, and tomorrow. The renewal programme needs to be integrated in the wider context of transitions such as climate change, biodiversity, inclusiveness and circularity. In this way the challenge is an opportunity to redesign the network. This Mini-Symposium brings together novel insights into the environmental, technical and societal impacts of renewal decisions on the future performance of infrastructure assets. Topics include: integrated design, coupling of functionalities, adaptive engineering and planning, infrastructure performance simulations, circularity assessment, and sustainable procurement.

MS 12 – Advanced Strengthening and Retrofitting Solutions for Existing Concrete Structures

Norbert Randl

Carinthia University of Applied Sciences
Villach, Austria

Edoardo Rossi

Carinthia University of Applied Sciences
Villach, Austria

The ever-increasing number of ageing structures and the awareness of the limit of the exploitable resources, leads to the need of performance-oriented, cost-efficient, and sustainable strengthening and retrofitting solutions. Concrete is the most widely used modern construction material and much effort is put in developing highly efficient solutions. Such solutions may include high-performance and/or eco-friendly materials, user-friendly installation techniques, highly efficient technical approaches, or any other innovative solution that can strongly increase the performance of the existing concrete environment. The mini-symposium aims at gathering the latest state of the art in such a field and disseminate the recent findings.

MS 13 – Safety and Durability of High-Performance Structures

Xiang-Lin Gu

Tongji University
Shanghai, China

Qian-Qian Yu

Tongji University
Shanghai, China

It is the foundation to ensure functions of civil engineering infrastructures for building resilient cities. High-performance structures are therefore attracting more and more attention. However, failure mechanisms of these structures under multiple hazards and complex environmental actions have not been fully understood. The aim of this special session is to showcase recent progress and advances in understanding safety and durability of high-performance structures, including triggering mechanisms of multiple hazards and action mechanisms of complex environmental actions, degradation mechanisms and repair methods of structural materials under complex environmental actions, failure mechanisms and control/resilience enhancement methods for a single structure and civil engineering infrastructural systems under multiple hazards and complex environmental actions.
Topic areas of interest but not limited to:

  • High performance metal and concrete materials and their durability
  • High performance structures and catastrophe analysis
  • Performance design of structure-component-node based on life cycle

MS 14 – Coupled Chemical, Physical, and Mechanical Processes in Cementitious Materials for Short- and Long-term Behavior of R.C. and P.C. Structures

Giovanni Di Luzio

Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy

Roman Wan-Wendner

Ghent University
Gent, Belgium

Mohammed Alnaggar

Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge, TN, USA

Jan Vorel

Czech Technical University
Prague, Czech Republic

Concrete is still the second most used material in the world after water. No other construction material matches its low cost, ease of processing and versatility. Every day, new developments are introduced to either improve the state of the art of currently used cementitious materials or to mitigate one or more of its downsides either from durability or sustainability points of view. However, to understand and predict the overall time-dependent behavior of cementitious materials, the complex and coupled chemo-physical and mechanical processes that govern their behavior need to be elucidated. Also considering multiple deterioration mechanisms for concrete structures, such as steel corrosion, delayed ettringite formation, alkali-aggregate reaction, freeze- thaw degradation, chemical attacks, etc. This Mini-Symposium will provide a forum for international experts and researchers to discuss recent developments in computational modeling and experimental characterization of coupled chemical, physical and mechanical processes in cementitious materials. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: time-dependent behavior with focus on strength gain, two-way coupling between transport, shrinkage, creep, crack healing, and damage induced by loads or environmental/chemical processes. Materials of interest include: Portland Cement based materials, Ultra-High Performance Concrete, Fiber Reinforced Concrete, Polymer/Geopolymer concrete and all other Eco-friendly cementitious materials with partial to full Portland Cement replacement.

MS 15 – Deconstruction and Reuse of Steel and Lightweight Metal Structures

Markus Kuhnhenne

RWTH Aachen University
Aachen, Germany

Paul Kamrath

Paul Kamrath Ingenieurrückbau GmbH
Dortmund, Germany

The steel industry is responsible for 8% of global and 20% of industrial CO2 emissions, with more than 50% directly attributable to the construction sector. Therefore, the implementation of the principles of the circular economy in steel and lightweight metal construction has a major impact on global climate policy goals and holds great potential to reduce the environmental impact of construction product manufacturing and the dependence on non-renewable raw materials. This symposium will focus on the deconstruction and reuse of existing steel and lightweight metal structures as well as on the design for future reuse.

MS 16 – Assessment of Existing Masonry Arch Bridge Infrastructure

Matthew Gilbert

University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

Giuliana Cardani

Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy

Thomas Boothby

Penn State University
State College, PA, USA

Dario Coronelli

Politecnico di Milano
Milan, Italy

Inspection, monitoring and structural analysis are all important tools in bridge assessment, and can together help ensure that existing masonry arch bridges are appropriately managed and maintained, such that they remain fit for purpose for future generations.
Specifically, information gathered via application of various inspection and monitoring techniques can be used to inform analysis models, enabling current bridge behaviour to be characterised, and, considering anticipated traffic and environmental actions, also allowing future behaviour to be predicted. This in turn allows planning and prioritization of maintenance, repair and strengthening interventions.
This mini-symposium will bring together researchers involved in the inspection, monitoring and/or numerical modelling of masonry arch bridges, with a view to advancing the ways in which these bridges are assessed in the future.

MS 17 – Recent Advance in Seismic Protection Systems: Design, Modeling and Testing Strategies of Traditional and Innovative Solutions

Alberto Pavese

University of Pavia
Pavia, Italy

Marco Furinghetti

University of Pavia
Pavia, Italy

The adoption of strategies for seismic protection of structural systems have become widely spread worldwide in recent decades, thanks to the several research and practical applications, which have led to a better understanding of the effective contribution of the available strategies. More specifically, seismic isolation and energy dissipation devices represent the most suitable solutions for the reduction of structural vulnerability, with a consequent mitigation of the seismic risk. This Mini-Symposium provides a special occasion for researcher, practitioners and device producers to share knowledge about new design procedures, innovative solutions and advanced testing techniques in the field of seismic protection systems.

MS 18 – Safety and Maintenance of Masonry Arch Bridges: Diagnostic, Monitoring, Modelling, Risk Analysis and Retrofit Interventions

Francesco Cannizzaro

University of Catania
Catania, Italy

Nicola Cavalagli

University of Perugia
Perugia, Italy

Corrado Chisari

University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”
Aversa, Italy

Bartolomeo Pantò

University of Durham
Durham, UK

Fabrizio Scozzese

University of Camerino
Ascoli Piceno, Italy

Paolo Zampieri

University of Padua
Padua, Italy

Mattia Zizi

University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”
Aversa, Italy

Assessment, maintenance and rehabilitation represent some of the major challenges in the management of historical Masonry Arch Bridges (MAB) and influence the life-cycle of the infrastructures. This special session promotes a discussion on these aspects considering applications of existing methodologies and development of novel approaches for Structural Health Monitoring, diagnosis, damage detection and modelling, vulnerability assessment (including simplified and detailed numerical modelling) and risk analysis of masonry arch bridges, with respect to any relevant source of hazard, i.e.: traffic loads, earthquakes, flood-induced scour, landslides, long-term creep etc. Finally, the session will also cover research activity, case study, experimental results and numerical analysis outcomes concerning the repair and the strengthening of MABs with traditional or innovative techniques including investigations on the issues of sustainability, environmental impact and life-cycle assessment. The main topics that this special session is intended to collect are, but not limited to:

  • Life-cycle analysis;
  • Structural assessment of Masonry Arch Bridges;
  • Nonlinear behaviour of Masonry Arch Bridges;
  • Case studies of Masonry Arch Bridges: assessment and repair;
  • Innovative techniques and advanced materials for the strengthening of Masonry Arch Bridges;
  • Structural Health Monitoring of Masonry Arch Bridges;
  • Risk and vulnerability analysis under single and multiple hazards.