Semi-Plenary Lecture 5

Room: Audimax
Time: Wednesday, 30. September 2026, 10:20 - 11:00
Chair: Wangji Yan

Alba Sofi

Associate Professor
Department of Architecture and Design,
University “Mediterranea” of Reggio Calabria, Italy

Interval technologies in structural dynamics

Time-varying loads induced by natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, wind loads, or sea waves, exhibit not only an inherent random character but also epistemic uncertainties arising from measurement errors, limited or missing data, etc. These two sources of uncertainty can be effectively described using the imprecise stochastic process model. This lecture addresses modelling and propagation of imprecise stochastic excitations associated with various phenomena, including earthquakes and thunderstorms. The core idea is to account for epistemic uncertainties by means of an interval-valued power spectral density function derived from recorded data, with non-stationary excitations treated within an evolutionary spectral framework. Structural performance under imprecise stochastic excitations is then assessed using efficient propagation techniques based on the interval extension of classical random vibration theory. Several engineering applications are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in capturing the combined effects of randomness and imprecision, with a specific focus on structural reliability assessment.

Short Bio

Alba Sofi is currently an Associate Professor of Mechanics of Solids and Structures at the University “Mediterranea” of Reggio Calabria, Italy. In 2017, she obtained the National Scientific Qualification as a Full Professor. Dr. Sofi received her Ph.D. degree in Structural Engineering from the University of Palermo, Italy. She was a Visiting Scholar at Rice University (USA) and a Visiting Professor at Xidian University and Guangzhou University in China. She also held Visiting Fellow positions at the University of Oxford (UK) and the University of New South Wales (Australia). She serves as the Managing Editor of the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering, and is a member of the Editorial Board of several international journals, including the International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics and Advances in Engineering Software. She also serves as the 2nd Vice-Chair of the ASME Safety Engineering & Risk Analysis Division.

Dr. Sofi’s research interests encompass several areas, including stochastic dynamics, uncertainty quantification with specific expertise in interval analysis, fractional calculus, bridge-vehicle dynamic interaction, cable dynamics, and non-local elasticity theory.