The IUTAM Symposium on Advances in Nonlinear Stochastic Mechanics, held in Trondheim July 3-7, 1995, was the eighth of a series of IUTAM sponsored symposia which focus on the application of stochastic methods in mechanics. The previous meetings took place in Coventry, UK (1972), Sout'hampton, UK (1976), FrankfurtjOder, Germany (1982), Stockholm, Sweden (1984), Innsbruckjlgls, Austria (1987), Turin, Italy (1991) and San Antonio, Texas (1993). The symposium provided an extraordinary opportunity for scholars to meet and discuss recent advances in stochastic mechanics. The participants represented a wide range of expertise, from pure theoreticians to people primarily oriented toward applications. A significant achievement of the symposium was the very extensive discussions taking place over the whole range from highly theoretical questions to practical engineering applications. Several presentations also clearly demonstrated the substantial progress that has been achieved in recent years in terms of developing and implement ing stochastic analysis techniques for mechanical engineering systems. This aspect was further underpinned by specially invited extended lectures on computational stochastic mechanics, engineering applications of stochastic mechanics, and nonlinear active control. The symposium also reflected the very active and high-quality research taking place in the field of stochastic stability. Ten presentations were given on this topic ofa total of47 papers. A main conclusion that can be drawn from the proceedings of this symposium is that stochastic mechanics as a subject has reached great depth and width in both methodology and applicability.

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Experimental random excitation of nonlinear systems with multiple internal resonances.- Stochastic stability of viscoelastic systems under bounded noise excitation.- Fixed points and attractors for random dynamical systems.- Nonlinear wave propagation in complex structures modelled by random media with self-stresses.- Stochastic linearization and large deviations.- Meandering propagation of fatigue cracks through solids with randomly distributed properties.- The study of bifurcations through the solution of the Fokker-Planck equation.- Spectral response of a beam-stop system under random exitation.- Higher order approximations for maxima of random fields.- Extension of the stochastic differential calculus to complex processes.- Response of a hysteretic system under non-stationary earthquake excitation.- Nonlinear active control and stochastic excitation.- Viscoplastic responses with stochastic Q-damping for soil.- Gaussian white noise excited elasto-plastic oscillator of several degrees of freedom.- Fatigue crack growth under stochastic loading.- Small noise expansion of moment Lyapunov exponents for two-dimensional systems.- Non-perturbative FEM for deterministic and stochastic beams through inverse of stiffness matrix.- Strength and serviceability requirements in seismic deign using nonlinear SFEM.- Parametric models and stochastic integrals.- Stochastic response of irregular tracks under moving vehicles.- Monte Carlo simulation of dynamical systems of engineering interest in a massively parallel computing environment: An application of genetic algorithms.- Stochastic response of coupled platform-tether system under multi-directional seas.- Optimal control problems for nonlinear oscillatory systems with random perturbations.- Stochastic dynamics of nonlinear structures with random properties subject to stationary random excitation.- Wind field coherence and dynamic wind forces.- Wave propagation through randomly disordered near-periodic structures.- Harmonic response analysis of stochastic rods using spatial stochastic averaging.- Ship capsizing in random sea waves and the mathematical pendulum.- Random vibration of ship hulls.- Stochastic response of a system with space imperfections under moving load.- Moment equations for non-linear systems under renewal-driven random impulses with gamma-distributed interarrival times.- Micromechanically based constitutive laws and random fields in solid mechanics: Elasticity, plasticity and fracture.- Response correlations of linear systems with white noise linearly parametric inputs.- Parameter estimation for randomly excited non-linear systems.- Amplitude bounds of stochastic nonlinear multibody systems.- Engineering applications of stochastic mechanics.- Wind induced vibrations of high-rise structures.- A new tool for the investigation of a class of nonlinear stochastic differential equations: The Melnikov process.- Non-stationary response of stochastic systems via maximum entropy principle.- Lyapunov exponents and information dimensions of multi-degree-of-freedom systems under deterministic and stationary random excitations.- Randomly excited vibratory systems with variable structure.- Stability and invariant measures of perturbed dynamical systems.- New insights on the application of moment closure methods to nonlinear stochastic systems.- Unified analysis of complex nonlinear motions via densities.- Some recent advances in theory of stochastically excited and dissipative Hamiltonian systems.