Plenary Session
Seismic risk and resilience of civil infrastructure: towards the reconciliation of time and space

Performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) is the state-of-the-art for the assessment of seismic reliability and risk. It relies on the separation between, hazard, vulnerability, and consequences. It has proven effective to provide a framework for research and industry practice, even beyond the earthquake peril. Nevertheless, its classical formulation applies to the analysis of single site assets, such as buildings, and it is meant for long-term assessment. On the other hand, the increasing complexity of civil infrastructure systems and the need to aid decision making in different contexts, has stimulated the development of declensions of PBEE for specific time (e.g., real-time, operational forecasting, and recovery) and space (spatially distributed infrastructure, and system of interconnected infrastructure) scales. However, each of these developments currently employs ad-hoc probabilistic models, with different input information, that do not necessarily reconcile with each other. It is the main current challenge of research to provide a holistic modelling of PBEE components applicable all time and space scales. The keynote will provide a review of the current declensions of PBEE and discuss whether the unifying goal is at reach given the current advances and what are the outstanding challenges.

Iunio Iervolino is full professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Naples Federico II and at IUSS of Pavia. He has a master in Management Engineering and a master and a Ph.D. in Seismic Risk. He has worked long time under the supervision of C. Allin Cornell. His research revolves around the fields of risk analysis of industrial and civil infrastructure systems, earthquake engineering, structural reliability, engineering seismology and probabilistic hazard analysis. Since his Ph.D. thesis, on the topic of seismic risk assessment of process industry facilities, he has authored more than three hundred publications. Among awards and honors, Iunio received the AXA research fund grant in 2011, and in 2014 he was appointed Fulbright visiting professor at Stanford University. He has advised about twenty Ph.D. theses so far, and his former Ph.D. students are employed in the industry of insurance and risk analysis or became university professors worldwide. He is editorial board member or associate editor of several scientific journals, such as Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics, Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, Computer Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure.