Performance-Based Engineering Concepts: Past, Present and Future

The development of a fully performance based approach and framework to civil engineering appears to be the path that both the research and the normative communities have chosen to pursue for the near future. Indeed, such a choice entails a great effort in re-defining the basic concepts at the basis of the current design and codification philosophy in a harmonized, self-sufficient, coherent and non-misleading way; on the other hand, such an effort is deemed to pay off as a performance based approach to civil engineering is for sure a new, more mature, comprehensive and higher profile one, with respect to traditional prescriptive regulations and design procedures. The present paper aims at clarifying the basic aspects of performance-based concepts in civil engineering and at pointing out the main steps of their progressive implementation into normative documents and design guidelines, with a particular focus on seismic engineering. At first, introduction on the basic terminology and concepts in given, based on a review of the most recent research efforts on the matter; then, a short review of the state-of-the-art in the research and codification of Performance Based (PB) earthquake engineering concepts is carried out, in particular on the advancements made in the USA, Europe and Japan. Finally, a possible scheme for the classification of current and future normative documents based on their content in PB concepts is presented and outlined through a case study and some conclusions are drawn regarding the current needs and future developments in the field of classification and standardization of PB normative documents.

NEGRO Paolo;  MOLA Elena; 

2006-10-05

EAEE & ESC

JRC33351