Structural Robustness Design in Eurocodes

Robustness, which is a property that makes buildings not suffer disproportionate collapse, including progressive collapse, became a major design criterion following the Ronan Point failure in 1968 in London. A significant interest in robustness was later regenerated worldwide by the World Trade Centre incidents of September 2001. In 2005, the Joint Committee on Structural Safety (JCSS) formed its Task Group on Robustness to develop a document that would aid practitioners to undertake risk-based robustness design. This activity was completed in May 2011, lately under the umbrella of also the COST Action: TU0601. This paper presents a brief history of robustness design and the methods of design available in the Eurocodes.