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There are over 125 civil engineering structures worldwide that have been constructed using the principles of seismic isolation and 15 of these are in the United States. Although use of the technology is increasing in the United States it is significantly less than that seen in Japan and New Zealand. Some of the impediments that have been encountered, such as design codes, economics and government leadership are discussed and the paper provides a summary of the status of some of the solutions required for its more widespread use in the United States. A comparison with the Japanese implementation process is also provided.

In previous articles, we have considered a number of general issues concerned with evaluating methods and tools. In the next few articles we describe how to perform a specific type of evaluation exercise called Feature Analysis.This article discusses the principles of feature analysis and describes how to identify features and establish a means of scoring products against those features. Later articles consider how to plan a feature-based evaluation and how to analyze the results of an evaluation.

This article discusses the issues involved in selecting the list of features that will be used in a particular feature analysis evaluation exercise. We also consider candidate methods/tools can be evaluated by scoring them in terms of their provision of and support for features that are important to the users of technology.