1. Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the book contents and the most significant works from the literature on related topics. Each section of this chapter deals with one of the main parts of the book, namely, advanced structural theories, failure and damage analyses, virtual characterization and manufacturing. The first part of this volume presents structural theories to deal with the anisotropy of composites and to embed multifield and nonlinear effects to widen design capabilities. The aim is to provide methods to augment the fidelity of structural theories and lower computational costs with attention paid to the finite element method. The second part handles the damage analysis. The multiscale and multicomponent nature of composites leads to extremely complex failure mechanisms and predictive tools require physics-based models to lower the need for fitting and tuning from costly and lengthy experimental campaigns, and lower computational costs. Furthermore, the proper monitoring of in-service damage is decisive in a damage tolerant perspective. The third part presents recent advances to embed characterization and manufacturing effects in virtual testing. Higher cost-effectiveness claims the reduction of physical characterization campaigns as well as higher fidelity for multiscale identification. Variations of properties due to defects stemming from manufacturing can propagate through scales and dramatically alter performances. The characterization of the material requires proper uncertainty quantification tools based on stochastic models and should embed metadata handling for informed virtual testing.