Contains complete proceedings of SEWC '98 held in San Francisco, July 19-23, 1998.

An unexpected brittle failure of connections and of members occurred during the last earthquakes of Northridge and Kobe. For this reason a heightened awareness developed in the international scientific community, particularly in the earthquake prone countries of the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, of the urgent need to investigate this topic. This volume results from a European project dealing with the 'reliability of moment resistant connections of steel frames in seismic areas' It is a must have for engineerse who want to be at the cutting edge of design in seismic areas.

Objective of conference is to define knowledge and technologies needed to design and develop project processes and to produce high-quality, competitive, environment- and consumer-friendly structures and constructed facilities. This goal is clearly related to the development and (re)-use of quality materials, to excellence in construction management and to reliable measurement and testing methods.

Focussing on structural reliability methods, reliability-based optimization, structural system reliability and risk analysis, lifetime performance and various applications in civil engineering. Invaluable to all concerned with structural system reliability and optimization, especially students, engineers, and workers in research and development.