The “International Workshop on Advanced Earthquake Engineering Testing and Simulation for Near-Fault Ground Motions” is held to celebrate the 25th anniversary of NCREE since its inauguration in 1990. The headquarters laboratory of NCREE houses a 5mx5m triaxial shaking table for real dynamic tests, reaction-wall strong-floor testbed for quasi-static experiments, and a Multi-Axial Testing System (known as MATS) for quasi-static high axial load testing. During the past years, NCREE headquarters laboratory has taken its researchers and domestic academics to carry out a good number of world’s cutting edge experiments that created technological breakthroughs in the field of earthquake engineering, and thereby imposed significant impacts on earthquake engineering practice.

There have been wonderful moments from utilizing the current facilities, but research is an endless journey. As such, NCREE is now constructing its second laboratory, called NCREE Southern Laboratory, to feature a 8mx8m high-speed long-stroke triaxial shaking table, and a high speed Bi-Axial Testing System (known as BATS) for dynamic high axial load testing. The NCREE Southern Laboratory is close to the Taiwan High Speed Rail Station of Tainan, and has a comparable floor area to its Taipei Headquarters, but houses far more advanced cutting-edge testing facilities. The NCREE Southern Laboratory is currently under construction, projected to be completed by the end of 2016, and will be in operation in 2017. NCREE Southern Laboratory will enable its researchers and domestic academics to boldly explore the technological frontiers that have never been visited before.

In Taiwan, there are twenty Holocene (i.e., Category-I) active faults according to the Central Geological Survey. Based on this fact, 2.5 million buildings and 8.6 million residents live within a 10 km perimeter of these faults. As such, the Ministry of Science and Technology, National Development Council, National Applied Research Laboratories, and National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) jointly support the construction of NCREE Southern Laboratory in NCKU Kuei-jen (歸仁) Campus to enable research applied to mitigate potential near-fault catastrophic threats. In the immediate neighborhood of the NCREE Southern Laboratory, there are Fire Experiment Center and Mock-up Testing and Wind Tunnel Laboratory operated by the Architecture and Building Research Institute (ABRI), the Ministry of Interior. All these three labs, when brought together, will be able to form a Research Park for Near-Fault and Multiple Hazards Mitigation. This hazard mitigation Research Park provides a great opportunity to see how far professionals can push the boundary and deal with technological challenges from near-fault threat as well as multiple hazards.

The purpose of the workshop is, therefore, two-fold: First, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of NCREE since its inauguration in 1990. Second, to envision research needs in the near future by assimilating opinions and recommendations collected from world-leading experts and professors to ultimately reach community resilience under near-fault and multiple-hazards threats; in this regard, a proceedings publication from the workshop will become the most up-to-date reference to guide the future research of the NCREE Southern Laboratory.