Recent Research Developments in Seismic Design and Risk Assessment: From the Large Spatial Scale to Individual Cases

Dear Colleagues,

Following on from the appreciable success of the previous Special Issue, “Evaluation and Mitigation of Seismic Risk for Existing Buildings, Structures, and Infrastructures“, May 2020, this Special Issue seeks to gather together new contributions covering these important topics.

Medium- and high-intensity earthquakes are repeatedly the cause of substantial economic losses, exposing the significant of vulnerabilities of existing buildings (whether private or public or strategic), structures, and infrastructures. The social and economic losses resulting from such natural disasters are too great and are no longer acceptable. However, the principal problem still remains; the majority of buildings, structures, and infrastructures around the world requiring retrofitting interventions.

The costs to be incurred are exorbitant, and it is imperative that rigorous modeling and problem-solving approaches be used with the aim of defining clear mitigation strategies based on careful prioritization and selection of interventions. Despite recent research advances, significant improvements are still needed.

To mitigate seismic risk and reduce direct and indirect losses, governments, private individuals, insurance companies, banks, building owners, and construction professionals should operate at a variety of territorial scales. To facilitate this, accurate analytical and decision support tools are increasingly important.

All of the topics briefly described above are relevant; however, in recent years, concepts focused community resilience have taken center stage in mitigation strategies. Consequently, the seismic resilience of communities should receive greater attention in the development of seismic risk mitigation strategies.

This Special Issue calls for high-quality unpublished research works covering a variety of advanced approaches to seismic risk mitigation. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Innovative, simple, fast, readily available, and economically sustainable retrofitting strategies and optimized rules;
• Definition of rational criteria for risk-mitigation policies;
• Allocation of resources based on novel approaches and methods;
• Seismic resilience approaches to risk mitigation strategies;
• Seismic vulnerability evaluation and the retrofitting of buildings, structures, and infrastructures;
• Structural control, monitoring, and assessment of structural damage;
• Seismic hazard analysis;
• Case studies.

Prof. Dr. Marco Vona
Guest Editor

Dr. Angelo Anelli
Guest Editor Assistant

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• seismic design
• seismic resilience
• seismic hazard analysis