Introduction

On January 18-22, 2020, the 2^nd International Symposium on Seismic Performance and Design of Slopes (ISSPDS-Edinburgh-2020, https://www.isspds.eng.ed.ac.uk/) has been held in Edinburgh, U.K. Through Keynote Lectures, Invited Lectures and Regular Presentations, this symposium has successfully provided a platform for academic scientists, leading engineers, and students to exchange and share their experiences and research results in field of seismic performance and design of slopes.

Organizers and organizing committee

This symposium was hosted by The University of Edinburgh, U.K., and supported by Tongji University, China, the International Consortium on Geo-disaster Reduction (ICGdR) and the UNESCO Chair on Geo-environmental Disaster Reduction.

The Organizing Committee of this symposium includes:

Chair Person: Jin Sun (The University of Edinburgh, U.K.).

Vice Chair Persons: Yu Huang (Tongji University, China) and Fawu Wang (Shimane University, Japan).

The Secretariat of this symposium includes Chongqiang Zhu, Yankai Li, Yang Cui, Thomas Barker.

Report of the ISSPDS-Edinburgh-2020

The 2^nd International Symposium on Seismic Performance and Design of Slopes (ISSPDS-Edinburgh-2020) has been focused on the themes of “Uncertainty sources of seismic design of slopes”, “Dynamic behaviors of slope subjected to earthquake”, “Performance-based seismic design method of slopes”, “Prospect to the seismic design of slopes in future” and “Practice of seismic design in major slope project”. The symposium attracted more than 50 scholars and engineers from United Kingdom, China, Japan, Italy, Canada, Russia, Cyprus, United States, Iraq, Turkey, Germany, etc. to deliver about 30 high-quality academic presentations in the field of seismic performance and design of slopes. There are three major sessions in this symposium: Keynote Lectures, Invited Lectures and Regular Presentations, offering opportunities to discuss the most recent advances on seismic performance and design of slopes. In addition to the main sessions of the symposium, pre-event and post-event have also been organized.

Pre-event

On January 19, 2020, the council meeting of the Committee on Seismic Performance-based Design for Resilient and Sustainable Engineering was held at Salisbury Arms, Edinburgh. Prof. Yu Huang, the chairman of the ICGdR Committee on Seismic Performance-based Design for Resilient and Sustainable Engineering, delivered an opening address to introduce background, objectives and organization of the committee. During the meeting, the committee members summarized works related to formulating international standard for seismic design of slope in past two years. Moreover, the working plan for the next two years was also discussed at the end of the council meeting.

Plenary sessions of the ISSPDS-Edinburgh-2020

Open ceremony

Dr. Jin Sun, the chairman of the ISSPDS-Edinburgh-2020, facilitated the open ceremony. Three speeches were presented as the prelude (see Fig. 1). At the beginning, Prof. Conchúr Ó Brádaigh, the head of School of Engineering, The University of Edinburgh, declared the conference to open on behalf of the organizer, and delivered an opening speech to welcome all the distinguished scholars and experts from all over the world. Then Prof. Yu Huang, who was representing co-organizer of Tongji University, introduced the background of International Symposium on Seismic Performance and Design of Slopes and expressed his hope that this symposium could provide a platform for researches and engineers to exchange and share their experiences and latest research results. In the last greeting speech given by Prof. Fawu Wang, the Director-General of the ICGdR, introduced the International Consortium on Geo-disaster Reduction and UNESCO Chair on Geoenvironmental Disaster Reduction, welcomed all the researchers and expressed his gratitude to the organizers. The opening ceremony ended up with a group photo as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 1 Opening speech presented by (a) Prof. Conchúr Ó Brádaigh, (b) Prof. Yu Huang, (c) Prof. Fawu Wang

Fig. 2 Group photo of participants of the ISSPDS-Edinburgh-2020

Keynote lectures

The Keynote Lectures included 6 presentations in 3 sessions as summarized in Table 1. The first section was chaired by Dr. Jin Sun and Dr. Elisabeth Bowman. Firstly, Prof. Atsushi Yashima presented a quantitative probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) of existing ground-anchored slope during earthquake using the residual tensile force of ground anchor (Yashima et al. 2019). The second keynote lecture from Prof. Nico Gray introduced recent progress in modelling frictional hysteresis with a simple depth-averaged model that differs fundamentally from standard geophysical mass flow models (Edwards et al. 2019; Edwards et al. 2017). The second section of Keynote Lectures was chaired by Prof. Yu Huang and Prof. Nico Gray. Prof. Fawu Wang took two earthquake-induced landslides (i.e. landslides in Atsuma-cho, Hokkaido and another landslide in Shimane) to explore the motion mechanism and consider the countermeasures (Zhang et al., 2019). Dr. Elisabeth Bowman introduced the Rosetta stone International network on experimental debris flow modelling and further presented her recent achievements of physical modelling testing using particulate approaches. The third section of Keynote Lectures was chaired by Prof. Atsushi Yashima and Prof. Zixin Zhang. Pof. Xinli Hu proposed an experimental method of the reservoir landslide & piles system under long-term water-level fluctuations, which includes the design of physical model and multi-field monitoring system. This platform can be referenced to design the physical model test under water-level fluctuations and the monitoring can provide multi-field data to understand the deformation mechanism and long-term stability of reinforced reservoir landslides. Prof. Yu Huang systematically summarized the latest developments of performance-based design regarding the seismic performance evaluation of slopes (Xiong and Huang 2019). Moreover, he offered a perspective with regard to performance levels, earthquake ground motion, nonlinear dynamic analysis, stochastic reliability, and future research directions, and established a new generation framework for the performance-based design of slopes.

The titles of presentations of Keynote Lectures are list in Table 1. Figure 3 shows photos of each presenter during Keynote Lectures.

Table 1 Lists of the presentation in Keynote Lectures

Fig. 3 Keynote lectures presented by (a) Prof. Atsushi Yashima, (b) Prof. Nico Gray, (c) Prof. Fawu Wang, (d) Dr. Elisabeth Bowman, (e) Prof. Yu Huang, (f). Prof. Xinli Hu

Invited lectures and regular presentations

After keynote lectures, both invited lectures and regular presentations were conducted. There were 10 invited lectures and 12 regular lectures. The topics are related to uncertainty sources of seismic design of slopes, dynamic behaviors of slope subjected to earthquake, performance-based seismic design method of slopes, practice of seismic design in major slope project, etc. The details of presentations are listed in Tables 2 and Table 3.

Table 2 Lists of the presentation in Invited Lectures

Table 3 Lists of the regular presentations

Award ceremony

The awards included the “Best Paper Award” and “Young Researcher Award”. Shenghua Cui, Hanxiang Liu, Zhen Guo, Guihua Wang, Zhenkun Yang were awarded the “Best Paper Award”. Xi Xu, Min Xiong, Jian Huang, Kangfu Jiao, Dongpo Wang, Miao Yu were awarded “Young Researcher Award”. Prof. Atsushi Yashima, Prof. Nico Gray, Prof. Fawu Wang and Dr. Elisabeth Bowman presented certificates to recipients.

Closing session

Dr. Jin Sun, on behalf of organizer, gave a closing speech to review the symposium and appreciation to all the delegates.

Post-event

Part of participants joined the field geological survey of Edinburgh area. Dr. Chongqiang Zhu introduced the history and geological conditions of Edinburgh area during the field trip.

Invitation

The 3^rd International Symposium on Seismic Performance and Design of Slopes will be held in Tohoku University in March 2022. The Chairman of organizing Committee, Dr. Shuji Moriguchi (Fig. 4) introduced their plan for this symposium and history of Sendai, Japan. The organizers welcome all entities and individuals to participate this symposium.

Fig. 4 Chairman of Organizing Committee (Dr. Shuji Moriguchi) for the 3rd International Symposium on Seismic Performance and Design of Slopes

Summary

The ISSPDS-Edinburgh-2020 successfully provided an opportunity for international scholars to present state-of-the-art achievements in seismic performance and design of slopes from different aspects including field survey, monitoring, physical model tests, numerical simulation, etc. This symposium allows scholars to better appreciate and understand the key issues, future development directions and potential challenges in seismic performance and design of slopes. Hence, the ISSPDS-Edinburgh-2020 would be of milestone significance in seismic performance and design of slopes and is expected to inspire future works in this field.

(Reported by Chongqiang Zhu (University of Edinburgh, U.K., Tongji University, China), Jin Sun (University of Edinburgh, U.K.), Yu Huang (Tongji University, China) and Fawu Wang (Tongji University, China)