In our contemporary high-level society, civil engineering structures are expected to be designed to meet long-term requirements related to structural safety, robustness, serviceability, durability and sustainability. Life-cycle civil engineering provides the knowledge and tools to accommodate for these requirements and relates to the design, inspection, monitoring, assessment, maintenance and rehabilitation of structures and infrastructures taking into account their lifetime perspective.
The last decades there is a growing awareness of the importance of a life-cycle perspective in civil engineering and challenges exist to tackle the contemporary needs, for example related to the long-term prediction of material behaviour and structural response, the assessment of existing structures, inspection and maintenance strategies, life-cycle optimization, etc. Considering these needs, the objective of the International Association for Life-Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE) is to promote international cooperation in this field of expertise.
Previous editions of the bi-annual IALCCE symposium took place in Varenna (Lake Como, Italy, 2008), Taipei (Taiwan, 2010), Vienna (Austria, 2012), Tokyo (Japan, 2014) and Delft (The Netherlands, 2016). The Sixth International Symposium on Life Cycle Civil Engineering (IALCCE 2018) will be organized on behalf of IALCCE under the auspices of Ghent University in Ghent (Belgium) on October 28-31, 2018.