AbstractA meshless local Petrov–Galerkin (MLPG) formulation is presented for bending problems of shear deformable shallow shells with orthotropic material properties. Shear deformation of shells described by the Reissner theory is considered. Analyses of shells under static and dynamic loads are given here. For transient elastodynamic case the Laplace-transform is used to eliminate the time dependence of the field variables. A weak formulation with a unit test function transforms the set of governing equations into local integral equations on local subdomains in the plane domain of the shell. Nodal points are randomly spread in that domain and each node is surrounded by a circular subdomain to which local integral equations are applied. The meshless approximation based on the moving least-squares (MLS) method is employed for the implementation. Unknown Laplace-transformed quantities are computed from the local boundary integral equations. The time-dependent values are obtained by the Stehfest’s inversion technique.