Practical guidelines for the multivariate assessment of the structural risk in coastal and off-shore engineering

The present work is of methodological nature, and represents an addendum to the guidelines for multivariate analysis and design in coastal and off-shore engineering recently presented in literature. The target of the paper is to provide a general framework for the multivariate assessment of the risk of failure by using a structural approach. Shortly, Monte Carlo procedures are adopted in order to estimate, for given Return Periods, the design structural variable(s) of interest, which may depend on a set of multivariate random inputs. As an advantage, the distribution of the structural variable(s) is computed by means of non-parametric techniques, which replace the fit of parametric distributions, an awkward task involving arbitrary choices. A practical case study is used to show the application of the procedures, and to compare the structural-risk approach proposed here with the strategies adopted in previous papers.