“In technical problems where decisions must simultaneously satisfy several conflicting objectives, methods are based on benefit-cost analysis or multicriteria decision analysis helpful to identify the “optimal” decision. Usually big technical decisions are made by politics and influence the environment, but specialists, constructors and the society must have the ability to overview and inspect these decisions. Within this context, the concept of the environmental preservation has been developed, i.e. the long-term preservation of the ecosystem’s viability, as well as the concept of sustainability, that is covering present needs but not to the detriment of future needs. It has been observed that society develops a discerning ability on technological applications (hence an ecological predisposition) …”

“Earth is one of the most abundant, most locally available, cheapest and lowest energy input impact materials it‘s possible to build with.Τhe energy required to dig up and treat sufficient earth for a house, was all provided by humans and animals. Nowadays, mechanical extraction and mixing is the more likely method, but assuming the earth is sourced fairly locally to the site, it is still a very low-energy form of construction. Earth is a 100% eco-friendly building material.”

“Earth is one of the most abundant, most locally available, cheapest and lowest energy input impact materials it‘s possible to build with.Τhe energy required to dig up and treat sufficient earth for a house, was all provided by humans and animals. Nowadays, mechanical extraction and mixing is the more likely method, but assuming the earth is sourced fairly locally to the site, it is still a very low-energy form of construction. Earth is a 100% eco-friendly building material.”

“Arch shape is one of the oldest used in architecture and structural engineering, but thanks to its efficiency it is still frequently used, specially, for long span bridges. The shape of an arch is reached at the conceptual design stage, usually resulting in one of three idealized configurations: circular, parabolic or catenary. These forms become bending-less arches under certain fixed load conditions. Although the real structural elements are subjected to a huge number of possible load combinations, there is an only one “bending-less” configuration that is possible, while the safety evaluation must be conducted for each possible load configurations, that means considering static coupling effects of bending and shear actioning on each arch sections.”

“Arch arised as structural system more than two thousand years ago, but, in spite of this, it is still not widely diffused and is mainly adopted in presence of large spans. The structural efficiency of arches primarily depends on optimal material exploitation, i.e. minimization of internal stress eccentricity that reduces structural material volume and weight. An efficient structure, under these terms, leads to simple and light scaffolding, so contributing in minimizing construction costs. So, although literature on arches is already significant, there is still scope for design optimization. This study is framed within this context and deals with the structural analysis of end perfectly-constrained plane circular arches under uniformly distributed vertical load and self weight…”

“The work done, lays the foundations for a design methodology that connects the formal and structural aspects of an architecture passing through the parametrization of geometric shapes. To carry out the steps of the design method, the design of a steel pedestrian bridge was experimented. The analysis of the structure made use of the AutoDesk Structural Analysis Robot calculation software; the geometry was parameterized using AutoDesk Dynamo Studio software (Robot plug-in). The architectural design was carried out using the aforementioned software, managing to connect the formal and the structural part of the project, reaching a focus on the forms of architecture that directly influence the structural functionality. The advantage in this type of design lies in being able to analyze a structure and assign different…”

“This work proposes a shape and topology optimization framework oriented towards conceptual architectural design. A particular emphasis is put on the possibility for the user to interfere on the optimization process by supplying information about his personal taste. More precisely, we formulate three novel constraints on the geometry of shapes; while the first two are mainly related to aesthetics, the third one may also be used to handle several fabrication issues that are of special interest in the device of civil structures. The common mathematical ingredient to all three models is the signed distance function to a domain, and its sensitivity analysis with respect to perturbations of this domain; in the present work, this material is extended to the case where the ambient space is equipped with anisotropic tensor….”

“In this paper, a novel two-dimensional scissor structure that transforms between concave and convex configurations is presented. The structure is designed by a method of assembling kite or anti-kite loops in the flat configuration. Angulated units are generated from the assembled loops. Finally, a new angulated scissor unit is introduced in order to design the novel scissor structure. Keywords: angulated units, anti-kite loops, kite loops, scissor structure”

“In the past years a great variety of nature-inspired algorithms have proven their ability to efficiently handle combinatorial optimization problems ranging from design and form finding problems to mainstream economic theory and medical diagnosis. In this study, a new metaheuristic algorithm called Pity Beetle Algorithm (PBA) is presented and its efficiency against state-of-the-art algorithms is assessed. The proposed algorithm was inspired by the aggregation behavior, searching for nest and food, of the beetle named Pityogenes chalcographus, also known as six-toothed spruce bark beetle. This beetle has the ability to locate and harvest on the bark of weakened trees into a forest, while when its population exceeds a specific threshold it can infest healthy and robust trees as well…”

“In the framework of fracture mechanics 2 or 3 dimensional modelling approaches are mostly employed in order to simulate cracks. However, in many applications 1D models that represent cracked structural members can be proved to be very useful. A crack contributes to abrupt stiffness reduction, causing “jump” in the displacement field close to the crack, in the present work the observation that the presence of cracks causes also stress and strain redistribution at some distance from the crack tips as resulted from fracture mechanics solutions is underlined. An appropriate “smoothed” stiffness reduction is introduced as a function from the distance from the crack consistent energetically with the Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) solutions…”

“Optimizing the shape and topology (S&T) of structures to improve their acoustic performance is quite challenging. The exact position of the structural boundary is usually of critical importance, which dictates the use of geometric methods for topology optimization instead of standard density approaches. The goal of the present work is to investigate different possibilities for handling topology optimization problems in acoustics and elasto-acoustics via a level-set method. From a theoretical point of view, we detail two equivalent ways to perform the derivation of surface-dependent terms and propose a smoothing technique for treating problems of boundary conditions optimization. In the numerical part, we examine the importance of the surface-dependent term in the shape derivative…”

“Through increasing international research and application activities in the last years, seismic isolation has proven to be an innovative passive control technique in the area of performance-based design of buildings. Seismic isolation is principally based on the incorporation of flexible isolators at the base of low-rise buildings in order to shift the fundamental period outside of the dangerous for resonance, range of periods. In extending the concept of base isolation, the present contribution refers to the control of multi-storey structures under earthquake actions by means of introducing seismic isolation at different elevations of the structure. Thus, the structural response is influenced decisively by the vertically distributed seismic isolation, …”

“Emergency infrastructure inspections are of the essence after a seismic event as a carefully planned inspection in the first and most critical hours can reduce the effects of such an event. Metaheuristics and more specifically nature inspired algorithms have been used in many hard combinatorial engineering problems with significant success. The success of such algorithms has attracted the interest of many researchers leading to an increased interest regarding metaheuristics. In the present literature many new and sophisticated algorithms have been proposed with interesting performance characteristics. On the other hand, up to date developments in the field of computer hardware have also had a significant influence on algorithm design…”