Overview

This special issue of International Journal for Engineering Computations contains extended versions of the papers first presented by several invited speakers at the NATO-sponsored advanced research workshop on Multi-physics and multi-scale computer models in non-linear analysis and optimal design of engineering structures under extreme conditions , which was held in Bled, Slovenia, from 13 to 17 June 2004. It also features a couple of papers contributed by young researchers, who all made short presentations of their research works at that meeting. The collected papers seek to present the most recent research achievements on this currently very active research topic, and are therefore considered to be more suitable for a scientific journal than for a book-like presentation of keynote lectures, which was already published (Ibrahimbegovic and Brank, 2004). We are grateful to our colleague (and one of the keynote lecturers at the NATO-ARW in Bled) Professor D.R.J. Owen, the Editor of International Journal for Engineering Computations, for kindly providing us an opportunity to gather all those contributions in the present special issue.

The kind of questions, which were raised herein and discussed thoroughly, are rather diverse, just as one can expect for the research field as rich and as active as the one of engineering structures. When attempting a rough classification of the published papers that could help to guide potential readers, we can...