Vols. 1-44 include Proceedings of the annual meeting, 1889-1933, later published separately.

Uncertainty presents significant challenges in the reasoning about and controlling of complex dynamical systems. To address this challenge, numerous researchers are developing improved methods for stochastic analysis. This book presents a diverse collection of some of the latest research in this important area. In particular, this book gives an overview of some of the theoretical methods and tools for stochastic analysis, and it presents the applications of these methods to problems in systems theory, science, and economics.

The current state-of-the-art allows seismologists to give statistical estimates of the probability of a large earthquake striking a given region, identifying the areas in which the seismic hazard is the highest. However, the usefulness of these estimates is limited, without information about local subsoil conditions and the vulnerability of buildings. Identifying the sites where a local ampli?cation of seismic shaking will occur, and identifying the buildings that will be the weakest under the seismic shaking is the only strategy that allows effective defence against earthquake damage at an affordable cost, by applying selective reinforcement only to the structures that need it. Unfortunately, too often the Earth’s surface acted as a divide between seism- ogists and engineers. Now it is becoming clear that the building behaviour largely depends on the seismic input and the buildings on their turn act as seismic sources, in an intricate interplay that non-linear phenomena make even more complex. These phenomena are often the cause of observed damage enhancement during past ear- quakes. While research may pursue complex models to fully understand soil dyn- ics under seismic loading, we need, at the same time, simple models valid on average, whose results can be easily transferred to end users without prohibitive expenditure. Very complex models require a large amount of data that can only be obtained at a very high cost or may be impossible to get at all.

This volume collects several extended articles from the first workshop on Best Practices in Physics-based Fault Rupture Models for Seismic Hazard Assessment of Nuclear Installations (BestPSHANI). Held in 2015, the workshop was organized by the IAEA to disseminate the use of physics-based fault-rupture models for ground motion prediction in seismic hazard assessments (SHA). The book also presents a number of new contributions on topics ranging from the seismological aspects of earthquake cycle simulations for source scaling evaluation, seismic source characterization, source inversion and physics-based ground motion modeling to engineering applications of simulated ground motion for the analysis of seismic response of structures. Further, it includes papers describing current practices for assessing seismic hazard in terms of nuclear safety in low seismicity areas, and proposals for physics-based hazard assessment for critical structures near large earthquakes. The papers validate and verify the models by comparing synthetic results with observed data and empirical models. The book is a valuable resource for scientists, engineers, students and practitioners involved in all aspects of SHA.