Foreword -- Preface -- Finite element Limit Analysis and porous Mises-Schleicher material;  Franck Pastor, Joseph Pastor and Djimedo Kondo -- Limit Analysis: A Layered Approach for Composite Laminates; Aurora Angela Pisano, Paolo Fuschi, Dario De Domenico -- Shakedown analysis of kinematically hardening structures in n-dimensional loading spaces; J.-W. Simon -- Computation of bounds for anchor problems in limit analysis and decomposition techniques;  J. J. Munoz, N.  Rabiei , A. Lyamin, and A. Huerta -- Shakedown analysis of Reissner-Mindlin plates using the edge-based smoothed finite element method; Thanh Ngọc Trần and M. Staat -- Progress in plastic design of composites;  Min Chen, Abdelkader Hachemi -- The Residual Stress Decomposition Method (RSDM): A novel direct method to predict cyclic elastoplastic states; Konstantinos V. Spiliopoulos and Konstantinos D. Panagiotou -- Use of layout optimization to solve large-scale limit analysis and design problems;  Matthew Gilbert, Colin Smith, Samuel Hawksbee and Andrew Tyas -- Macroscopic modeling of porous non associated frictional materials; Long Cheng, Gery de Saxce and Djimedo Kondo -- Direct evaluation of the post-buckling behavior of slender structures through a numerical asymptotic formulation; Giovanni Garcea, Antonio Bilotta, Antonio Madeo and Raffaele Casciaro -- A Quasi-Periodic Approximation based Model Reduction for Limit Analysis of Micropile Groups; Zied Kammoun, Joseph Pastor and Hichem Smaoui -- The Anderson-Bishop Problem - Thermal Ratchetting of a Polycrystalline Metals;  A.R.S. Ponter and A.C.F. Cocks -- Recent development and application of the Linear Matching Method for design limits in plasticity and creep: an overview; Haofeng Chen and Weihang Chen.

Knowing the safety factor for limit states such as plastic collapse, low cycle fatigue or ratcheting is always a major design consideration for civil and mechanical engineering structures that are subjected to loads. Direct methods of limit or shakedown analysis that proceed to directly find the limit states offer a better alternative than exact time-stepping calculations as, on one hand, an exact loading history is scarcely known, and on the other they are much less time-consuming. This book presents the state of the art on various topics concerning these methods, such as theoretical advances in limit and shakedown analysis, the development of relevant algorithms and computational procedures, sophisticated modeling of inelastic material behavior like hardening, non-associated flow rules, material damage and fatigue, contact and friction, homogenization and composites.