During the last two decades, the increasing capabilities of common use hardware fostered a strong evolution in computational techniques in non-linear structural analysis and risk assessment. In this respect, some traditional strategies, such as the well-known finite element method, have been significantly improved to address complex problems.

Nevertheless, although finite elements are the most popular strategy in computational mechanics, the increasing hurdle of frontline research has highlighted some intrinsic limitations of this strategy. For this reason, several alternative approaches are currently under investigation.

This is the case with Galerkin meshfree methods, belonging to the weak form category, as well as strategies such as the virtual element method, X-FEMs, multi-scale approaches, and several more phylosophies.

An important aspect of the most recent research advancements concerns the completely new philosophy about the structure of the hardware resourced. While the classical “single-cored” approach made researchers focus on developing computational algorithms to improve the convergence trend of the analyses, the recent parallel-computing strategy and the even more powerful cloud-computing have modified the research direction.

On the one hand, the increased computational capacity permits the use of very demanding strategies that were ignored in the past because of their burden; on the other hand, structural analysis algorithms must adapt to the new parallel-computing philosophy. In this sense, research on the computational analysis of structures is very dynamic and lively.

The Special Issue will collect original contributions from frontline research concerning the development of computational strategies and algorithms for the non-linear analysis of structures, for their probabilistic assessment and risk analysis.

I encourage you to send manuscripts containing scientific findings within the broad field of structural engineering, which include but are not limited to the following: structural non-linear analysis; wind engineering; building assessment; earthquake engineering; impact engineering; reliability evaluation; structural monitoring and control. Both theoretical and practice-oriented papers, including case studies and reviews, are welcome.

Dr. Salvatore Sessa
Guest Editor

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• Non-linear analysis
• finite element method
• limit analysis
• virtual element method
• X-fem