General report: session on connections

As a result of a world-wide intensive research activity, a new design concept for structural moment resistant joints has been suggested and implemented in design codes. In the present paper, its background is first briefly described and the main contributions to its development are presented. As a matter of fact, because of the high number of past and ongoing researches, reports and papers devoted to this topic, an exhaustive list of all these works could not be established in a limited number of pages. The possibilities of extension of the new design concepts, which have been first developed for steel beam-to-column joints under static loading, are particularly pointed out. This aspect appears quite important as in the near future it should provide designers with a unified design approach for structural joints whatever their loading, their configurations and the nature of their constitutive material(s). (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.