Working Commission CIB-W18 under the International Council for Building Research and Innovation, CIB (originally: Conseil International dû Batiment) was established in 1959 as a study group on timber structures. Two International Conferences were held in 1961 and 1965.

In 1973 the group was reorganised and the scope was defined as: To study and highlight the major differences between the relevant national design codes and suggest ways in which the future development of these codes and standards might take place in order to minimise or eliminate these differences.

John Sunley (Building Research Establishment, later TRADA, UK) became co-ordinator. In 1985 he was replaced by Chris Stieda (Forintek, Canada) who continued until Hans Blass (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) took over in 1992. Members have been specialist from Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, USA and a few African and South American countries.

CIB-W18 has met at least once per year since 1973. At the meeting papers have been presented and discussed. The papers and the discussion for each meeting have been documented in Proceedings. The proceedings – in excess of 20 000 pages containing more than 1000 papers – are an invaluable collection of knowledge.

Some proceedings are available for download, see Proceedings

Papers on specific topics can be searched for, see Review