Robustness of building structures - recent developments and adopted strategy

Recent events such as natural catastrophes or terrorism attacks have highlighted the necessity to ensure the structural integrity of buildings under an exceptional event. According to the Eurocodes and some different other national design codes, the structural integrity of civil engineering structures should be ensured through appropriate measures but, in most cases, no precise practical guidelines on how to achieve this goal are provided.
At the University of Liège, the robustness of building frames is investigated following the so-called “alternative load path method”, with the final objective to propose design requirements to mitigate the risk of progressive collapse considering the conventional scenario “loss of a column” further to an unspecified event. In particular, a complete analytical procedure has been developed for the verification of the robustness of steel or composite plane frames. For sake of simplicity, these first works have been based on the assumption that the dynamic effects linked to the column loss were limited and could therefore be neglected. More recently, complementary works have been carried out with the objective to address the dynamic effects. Besides, the extension of the static procedure to actual 3D frames is under investigation in Liège. The present paper gives a global overview of the ongoing researches in the field of robustness at the University of Liège and, in particular, the global strategy aiming at deriving design requirements is detailed.