The overall cost associated to the construction of geotechnical structures (such as retaining and underground structures) in seismic areas is about 30% of the cost of the entire construction project for a building. This percentage is even higher for complex infrastructure systems such as sport arenas and multi-purpose complexes. According to a recent study coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme, the construction industry generates roughly 40% of the worldwide energy and process-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Despite these impressive numbers, for the design of retaining structures, Europe-wide policies, guidelines, and building codes are still based on a century-old theory that unrealistically assumes that the seismic earth pressure increment is proportional to surface acceleration. Approaches based on this theory often lead to over-conservative design of retaining structures, causing an unsustainable consumption of resources without any benefits in terms of performance and safety of the construction. This makes this approach against the principles of the European Green Deal that identified the need of cleaner constructions in the Building and Renovation policy area.
A novel theoretical framework that I have been developing over the years during my research experiences in Italy, the UK, and the USA can solve this issue, making the design of geotechnical structures more technically sound and green. An initial application of this theory, that I developed alongside two USA-based colleagues, was recently added to the US National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program seismic recommended provision. Such framework is based on robust soil-structure interaction principles. Its assumption is that seismic earth pressure on retaining structure does not have any fundamental relationship with the amplitude of the earthquake shaking. This quantity is instead mainly related to the amount of relative displacement between the structure and the retained soil. This is the theoretical foundation of the ReStructure 2.0 project. Its overall objective is the development of a novel approach to design more sustainable, affordable, and green retaining structures in seismic areas. This transformative method builds upon soil-structure interaction theories and leverages cloud-based high-performance computing capabilities, ad-hoc developed numerical simulations, data science, and artificial intelligence approaches.
