Probabilistic Design of Breakwaters in Shallow, Hurricane-prone Areas

Introduction

One of the failure mechanisms of a rubble mound breakwater is the failure of its armour layer.

In order to determine the stability of an armour layer, the design load has to be defined, which

is in fact the wave that attacks the structure. Being a highly stochastic phenomenon, the wave

action is not easily defined, while there is always some uncertainty inherent to its definition.

In a deterministic calculation this uncertainty is being left to engineering judgment, as the

possible variations of the design wave height are not taken into account in a coherent way. In

order to explicitly incorporate uncertainties into the design process, and therefore increase its