Professor Lignos Inaugural Lecture

Professor Lignos gave his Inaugural Lecture at EPFL in March 2nd 2017. The title of the Inaugural lecture was "Collapse Risk Assessment of Steel Structures: Accomplishments & Future Challenges".

The abstract of the lecture was as follows: The principal goal of Performance-Based Design is to protect life safety by preventing structural collapse. Uncertainties associated with regional construction practices; the input loading and the dynamic response of structures impose the acceptance of a “tolerable” probability of structural collapse. Therefore, we should be able to evaluate the collapse risk of structures with sufficient confidence, such that stakeholders, engineers, (re-) insurers and decision makers can take proper pre-disaster measures to reduce the effects of natural and man-made hazards for the best interest of our society. This talk will present a computational framework that facilitates the systematic assessment of the collapse risk of steel structures subjected to seismic loading. The same framework has been validated with carefully conducted experiments. An attempt is made to utilize the same framework to evaluate the use of advanced technologies that promote infrastructure resilience under natural hazards. Recently developed approaches are also presented that extend the same framework to city-scale such that community resilience can be evaluated. Future challenges are discussed.