For elastic-perfectly plastic structures under prescribed loading histories, the well-known Melan's theorem gives a sufficient condition for shakedown to occur, i.e. for the evolution to become elastic in the large-time limit. The original Melan's theorem rests on the assumption that the material properties remain constant in time, independently on the applied loading. This communication addresses the long standing issue of extending Melan's theorem to temperature-dependent (or time-dependent) elastic moduli. The main motivation is to extend the range of applications of Melan's theorem to thermomechanical loading histories with large temperature fluctuations: In such case, the variation of the elastic properties with the temperature cannot be neglected. Some recent results obtained in perfect plasticity and viscoplasticity are presented and discussed.