Book excerpt: This book presents the state of the art of artificial intelligence techniques applied to structural engineering. The 28 revised full papers by leading scientists were solicited for presentation at a meeting held in Ascona, Switzerland, in July 1998. The recent advances in information technology, in particular decreasing hardware cost, Internet communication, faster computation, increased bandwidth, etc., allow for the application of new AI techniques to structural engineering. The papers presented deal with new aspects of information technology support for the design, analysis, monitoring, control and diagnosis of various structural engineering systems.