Editorial for the VEESD 2013 special issue

Abstract

The Vienna Congress on Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics, VEESD 2013, took place in August 2013 at the Vienna University of Technology, which is located in the Center of Vienna. This congress aimed at fostering scientific interaction among the vast community of researchers contributing to earthquake engineering, seismology, and structural dynamics in a broad sense. About 400 participants from all over the world delivering about 270 presentations of the latest achievements in these fields made this scientific event a great success.We are proud to present the VEESD 2013 special issue in the Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering. It comprises 13 contributions, which were selected on the basis of the response and feedback of both mini-symposium organizers and participants. The papers of this special issue provide new insight into the state-of-the-art of different fields in earthquake engineering based on experimental, analytical, and numerical studies as well as field observations after earthquakes, as it becomes obvious from the subsequent short summary.The first paper by Weatherill et al. (2015) illustrates the effect of the spatial variability of earthquake ground motions upon the resulting seismic loss of aggregated portfolios of heterogeneous building typologies. Iervolino et al. (2015) present a model on life-cycle assessment considering the effect of damaging aftershocks. Using a probabilistic simulation-based framework Gidaris and Taflanidis (2015) assess the performance and optimal design of fluid viscous dampers through lifecycle criteria. Tasligedik et al. (2015) propose low damage solutions for non-structural drywall partitions capable of reaching high levels of drift without loss of serviceability. Penna (2015) discusses in his contribution several aspects of the seismic response and capacity of stone masonry buildings. By the evaluation of experimental results Petry and Beyer (2015) address the horizontal in-plane