Optimum design and maintenance of pavements require an accurate prediction of their deterioration process. This process is highly influenced by the uncertainties in traffic load and load distribution, and the parameter and model uncertainties associated with all mechanical properties of materials and structural behavior. This paper presents a model for optimizing the design of flexible asphalt pavement structures. The model takes into account the fatigue damage caused on the asphalt surface and the degradation of granular materials caused by repetitive loading cycles. Mechanical considerations are combined with construction and rehabilitation costs as well as financial factors such as the discount rate. Results of an illustrative example showed that the reliability based design optimization (RBDO) combined with a long-term maintenance policy of pavements produces appropriate integral designs. The analyses of the results have shown the advantages of the procedure proposed.

Thin reinforced concrete (RC) walls with single layer reinforcement have been used for houses and buildings in several Latin American countries. Although some design codes include recommendations for squat thin walls in low‐rise constructions, its seismic performance has not been validated adequately in past earthquakes. This article presents the results of an experimental campaign of nine full‐scale specimens conducted to characterize the influence of the steel type, the reinforcement ratio, and the wall thickness on the seismic behavior of squat thin RC walls with single layer reinforcement. Both welded wire and deformed bars were used as web reinforcement. Experimental results are used to develop nonlinear models to assess the seismic behavior of a prototype two‐story house with welded wire reinforcement and deformed bars by means of incremental dynamic analyses. The experimental results show that the type of steel has the largest influence on wall seismic performance. The numerical results suggest that RC walls with single layer reinforcement are suitable for housing applications up to two stories in high seismicity regions, particularly walls detailed with deformed bars.

A seismic design method for reinforced concrete frames has been previously proposed based on eigenfrequency optimization. Here, performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) is used to assess the effectiveness of this design procedure. The findings show that the design method produces building designs with different distributions of strength and stiffness over building height. Consequently, these buildings have reduced drifts at lower stories, smaller collapse risk, and lower expected casualties. The results also demonstrate the benefit of using the PBEE framework to evaluate of novel approaches in seismic design, providing objective measures of their impacts on building seismic performance.

Several seismic optimization methods have been proposed to improve the performance of reinforced concrete framed (RCF) buildings; however, they have not been widely adopted among practising engineers because they require complex nonlinear models and are computationally expensive. This article presents a procedure to improve the seismic performance of RCF buildings based on eigenfrequency optimization, which is effective, simple to implement and efficient. The method is used to optimize a 10-storey regular building, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by nonlinear time history analyses, which show important reductions in storey drifts and lateral displacements compared to a non-optimized building. A second example for an irregular six-storey building demonstrates that the method provides benefits to a wide range of RCF structures and supports the applicability of the proposed method.