Advanced dynamic analyses in geotechnical earthquake engineering: opportunities and challenges

Dynamic finite element (FE) methods accounting for soil-structure interaction and implementing advanced elasto-plastic effective stress soil models are nowadays available to researchers working in the geotechnical earthquake engineering field. Although reasonable concerns exist among engineers and practitioners regarding the software usage protocols and the challenging calibration and initialisation of complex soil constitutive models, the higher accuracy of non-linear time domain numerical approaches has been proved in a number of applications, including site response analysis and micro-zonation studies, liquefaction evaluations, stability analyses of earth dams and artificial embankments, in-shore and off-shore foundation problems, assessment of deep excavations and tunnels performance. Within this context, the paper presents a review of the key ingredients governing the predictive capabilities of such advanced FE schemes, thus highlighting the opportunities they offer to geotechnical engineers working in the industry as well as possible future challenges in their application to the design of important geotechnical structures and infrastructures within a performance-based framework.