Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart tools capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Nowadays, as human beings, we use AI in our daily lives, even though we may not always be aware of it. For instance when asking Siri or Alexa to look something up for us, chatting with chatbots like ChatGPT and other alternatives to address our inquiries, or searching things on Google, and even something as simple as the pesky advertisements we get bombarded by online are all related somehow to AI. Although the increase in knowledge has shown in numerous branches in recent decades, Structural Engineering was born much more before the development of many modern sciences. Nevertheless, modern structural engineering as a discipline was systematically formalized over two centuries ago and used the first mathematical and physics applications to analyze and predict structures’ behavior under given loading conditions, providing a tool for designing them in a rational and cost-effective way. The development of specific analysis and computational methods for a wide range of structural problems permitted over the last two hundred years to revolutionize the world of the construction industry, tackling important challenges likewise designing tall buildings, long-span bridges, towers, and generally speaking, our cities and infrastructural systems. What the community currently perceives as a “mature” technology is the result of the advancements and in-depth development of designing procedures and, on the other side, the adoption of industrialized structural materials that permit ensuring mechanical parameters and in-service performance with statistical-based threshold reliability. The long history and the development of well-established analysis methods for structural design have bestowed on the civil engineering field the idea of being a hardly permeable sector to new approaches different from those well-established traditional physics-mathematical formulations. However, it is worth noting that over the decades, also approximated techniques have been established for tackling complex problems such as ones involving non-linearities issues.
Within this context, AI-based solutions can often provide valuable alternatives nowadays for efficiently solving new demanding problems and challenges in the Structural Engineering field. Therefore, the ArtIStE Research Group has been found to explore these new possibilities, in the direction of developing applications for future AI-based smart cities and smart infrastructures. Our research mission includes, but is not limited to, computational intelligence and soft computing methods, such as evolutionary and metaheuristic algorithms for coping structural optimization tasks, including also neural networks, fuzzy systems, expert feed-forward informed systems, and so on. Machine Learning (ML) methods such as classification, regression, and reinforcement learning, provide the possibility to develop new unseen data-driven approaches.
Therefore, in this website, our mission is setting a dissemination channel of our scientific research activities, providing to both researchers, professionals, students, or even simply enthusiasts, an overview of the most recent advances of AI applied in Structural Engineering applications, and as well as promoting related events and keynote speech. This website can be also the occasion for enstablishing new important and international collaborations between different colleagues and institutions worldwide.
