Computing in Civil Engineering—Lessons Learned from the 2005 ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering

Abstract

On July 12–15, 2005, a group of approximately 170 researchers and practitioners met in Cancun, Mexico, for the 2005 International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering to present and learn about current research and developments on information technology in civil engineering. The conference was geared toward professionals and researchers who are interested in computing in a wide range of civil engineering disciplines, such as infrastructure life-cycle management, construction engineering and management, structural engineering, environmental engineering, transportation engineering, geotechnical engineering, hydraulic engineering, sustainability, and disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. The six keynote speakers presented brilliant talks that introduced the major themes and topics of the conference. Ian F. C. Smith of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne EPFL talked about the opportunities and challenges in using sensors in structural engineering and strategies for appropriate interpretation of sensor data. He introduced innovations in the field of measurement science and devices that employ such technologies as global positioning, acoustic emission, electric potential drop, interferometry, holography, photogrammetry, MEMS, and optical fibers. He presented a new methodology for sensor placement by using entropy, and a model-based approach for structural diagnosis was used to illustrate the potential of multimodel reasoning. Amr S. Elnashai of the University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign introduced a framework for the computational or hybrid computational-experimental investigation of complex structures, their foundations, and underlying soil when subject to strong earthquake motion. The presented framework comprises a central integrator and peripheral components where available geotechnical and structural analysis platforms commercial packages or research analysis tools were combined to represent the most salient features of the response. Elnashai presented an extremely interesting example of a complex bridge that was modeled in ZEUS-NL, the structural computational platform of the Mid-America Earthquake Center, and OpenSees, the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center product, which models the soil strata by using UCSD geotechnical models.