There is currently ever pressing need to provide a critical assessment
of the current knowledge and indicate new challenges which are brought
by the present time in fighting the man-made and natural hazards in
transient analysis of structures. The latter concerns both the
permanently fixed structures, such as those built to protect the people
and/or sensitive storage material (e. g. military installations) or the
special structures found in transportation systems (e. g. bridges,
tunnels), and the moving structures (such as trains, plains, ships or
cars). The present threat of the terrorist attacks or accidental
explosions, the climate change which brings strong stormy winds or yet
the destructive earthquake motion that occurs in previously inactive
regions or brings about tsunamis, are a few examples of the kind of
applications we seek to address in this work. The common ground for all
the problems of this kind from the viewpoint of structural integrity,
which also justifies putting them on the same basis and addressing them
within the same context, is their sudden appearance, their transient
nature and the need to evaluate the consequence for a high level of
uncertainty in quantifying the cause. The problems of such diversity
cannot be placed within a single traditional scientific discipline, but
they call for the expertise in probability theory for quantifying the
cause, interaction problems for better understanding the physical nature
of the problems, as well as modeling and computational techniques for
improving the representation of inelastic behavior mechanisms and
providing the optimal design.