Civil engineering and symmetry

Abstract

A topic of utmost importance in civil engineering is finding optimal solutions throughout the life cycle of buildings and infrastructural objects, including their design, manufacturing, use, and maintenance. Operational research, management science, and optimisation methods provide a consistent and applicable groundwork for engineering decision-making. These topics have received the interest of researchers, and, after a rigorous peer-review process, eight papers have been published in the current special issue. The articles in this issue demonstrate how solutions in civil engineering, which bring economic, social and environmental benefits, are obtained through a variety of methodologies and tools. Usually, decision-makers need to take into account not just a single criterion, but several different criteria and, therefore, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches have been suggested for application in five of the published papers; the rest of the papers apply other research methods. The methods and application case studies are shortly described further in the editorial.