SUMMARYThis paper presents a fast multipole boundary element method (BEM) for the analysis of two-dimensional elastoplastic problems. An incremental iterative technique based on the initial strain approach is employed to solve the nonlinear equations, and the fast multipole method (FMM) is introduced to achieve higher runtime and memory storage efficiency. Both of the boundary integrals and domain integrals are calculated by recursive operations on a quad-tree structure without explicitly forming the coefficient matrix. Combining multipole expansions with local expansions, computational complexity and memory requirement of the matrix-vector multiplication are both reduced to O(N ), where N is the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs). The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed scheme are demonstrated by several numerical examples.