On the Assessment of Robustness – a Status and an Outlook

Triggered by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Centre towers significant renewed research efforts have been invested into achieving a better understanding on 1) how complex structural systems perform and might fail under extreme load events, 2) how their performance might be modelled and not least 3) how their performance can be improved. The present paper reports on the insights gained from a European research project titled ‘COST Action TU0601: Robustness of Structures’ established under the aegis of COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). Starting point is taken by presenting the fundamental idea behind the project, namely, a risk based formulation to the assessment of structural robustness. Thereafter, an overview of the organisation of the project is provided and a summary of the main results. Finally, an outlook is provided on the challenges still lying ahead in improving the best practices for robust structural design.