Reliability-Based Risk Assessment in Coastal Projects: Case Study in Turkey

Abstract

The risk of damage during the construction phase of a coastal structure was investigated by utilizing Level II and III reliability methods. Structural risks were incorporated in the planning phase of coastal projects by utilizing a practical risk management approach implemented in the Mezitli (Icel) Yacht Harbor project in Turkey. By specifying the exceedance probability of damage level at the design stage, the delay times of construction activities due to damage were obtained at the project-planning phase, which enabled the estimation of the project completion time. It is found that structural risk of damage in the construction period can be an important factor to be considered in the reliability-based project management, because coastal projects involve considerable damage risk during the construction phase. The application of Monte Carlo simulations (Level III), which is generally performed within a few minutes of CPU time in fast computers, has the advantage of robustness when compared with the second-order methods such as the Hasofer-Lind method, provided that the probability distribution of random variables and their correlation are described with an acceptable accuracy, which should be obtained from data accumulated over a sufficient number of years. In this study, by specifying the exceedance probability of “no damage level” at the design stage, the probability of construction completion times were estimated at the planning phase for the case study of Mezitli Yacht Harbor, where the probability distributions of random variables were obtained from the governmental archives.