CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Engineering Mechanics Institute International Conference Minisymposium on Optimizing Resilience and Robustness of Engineering Systems under Extreme Hazards

The submission website is at: https://emi-ic.asce.org/call-abstracts and during the submission, please select this Minisymposium:
MS 19: Optimizing Resilience and Robustness of Engineering Systems under Extreme Hazards.

Organizers:
Prof. Giuseppe Carlo Marano, Politecnico di Torino, ITALY
Dr. Gaurav Datta, INDIA

Aim and Scope:
Engineering systems and civil infrastructure are increasingly subjected to extreme hazards, including earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, technological failures, and cascading events. Although such hazards occur infrequently, their impacts can be devastating, resulting in significant human, economic, and environmental losses. In the face of growing uncertainties associated with climate change, urbanization, and aging infrastructure, the engineering community must move beyond traditional deterministic design philosophies toward robust and resilient performance-based frameworks. These frameworks must be firmly rooted in the fundamentals of engineering mechanics, ensuring that design and assessment strategies can capture complex interactions between loads, materials, and structural systems under uncertain and evolving conditions.

This Mini-Symposium aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of mechanics, optimization, and uncertainty quantification to advance methodologies that enable engineering systems to resist, absorb, and recover from extreme events. Robustness characterizes a system’s ability to sustain its functionality despite disturbances and modeling imperfections, while resilience represents its capacity to recover, adapt, and maintain performance following disruptions. Together, these attributes form the cornerstone of sustainable and adaptive infrastructure design.

The Mini-Symposium will provide a forum for discussing mechanics-based principles and computational strategies that drive innovation in the design and assessment of resilient systems. Emphasis will be placed on integrating probabilistic mechanics, multi-objective optimization, and data-driven modeling to address uncertainty and improve decision-making in complex engineering environments.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Mechanics-driven formulations for robust and resilient design
• Multi-objective and reliability-based optimization under uncertainty
• Probabilistic and stochastic mechanics of structures and materials
• Performance-based and risk-informed design frameworks
• Surrogate modeling, reduced-order modeling, and machine learning technique.
• Data-driven and hybrid computational approaches for resilience assessment
• Decision-making and adaptive control strategies under uncertainty


Important Dates:
Abstract Submission Deadline: Feb 28, 2026
Abstract Acceptance Notification: Apr 16, 2026
Early Registration Begins: Apr 16, 2026
Author Registration Deadline: Jun 12, 2026
Early Registration Ends: Jun 12, 2026
Regular Registration Begins: Jun 22, 2026
Regular Registration Ends: Aug 11, 2026
Late Registration Begins: Aug 12, 2026
Cancellation Deadline: Aug 19, 2026
Conference Begins: Sep 2, 2026