Review of Resilience-Based Design

The reliability of structures is affected by various impacts that generally have a negative effect, from extreme weather conditions, due to climate change to natural or man-made hazards. In recent years, extreme loading has had an enormous impact on the resilience of structures as one of the most important characteristics of the sound design of structures, besides the structural integrity and robustness. Resilience can be defined as the ability of the structure to absorb or avoid damage without suffering complete failure, and it can be chosen as the main objective of design, maintenance and restoration for structures and infrastructure. The latter needs further clarification (which is done in this paper), to achieve the clarity of goals compared to robustness which is defined in Eurocode EN 1991-1-7 as: \"the ability of a structure to withstand events like fire, explosions, impact or the consequences of human error, without being damaged to an extent disproportionate to the original cause\". Many existing structures are more vulnerable to the natural or man-made hazards due to their material deterioration, and a further decrease of its loadbearing capacity, modifying the structural performance and functionality and, subsequently, the system resilience. Due to currently frequent extreme events, the design philosophy is shifting from Performance-Based Design to Resilience-Based Design and from unit to system (community) resilience. The paper provides an overview of such design evolution with indicative needs for Resilience-Based Design giving few conducted examples.