Amsterdam quays under pressure: Modelling and testing of historic canal walls

Amsterdam faces the challenge of maintaining a domain of 200 km historic quay walls, which is a vital part of the city’s historical landscape. Many quays are currently in poor condition and require renovation or replacement in the near future, significantly impacting the city. The quay walls can be up to 300 years old and their structure...

Dynamic-risk-informed safety barrier management: An application to cost-effective barrier optimization based on data from multiple sources

An integrated approach for performance assessment and management of safety barriers in a systemic manner is needed concerning the prevention and mitigation of major accidents in chemical process industries. Particularly, the effects of safety barriers on system risk reduction should be assessed in a dynamic manner to support the decision-making...

Improving dike reliability estimates by incorporating construction survival

During construction of a dike, slope stability often reaches critical levels, due to the excess pore water pressures in the foundation. The loading condition during construction has similarities with the design conditions during flood loading. Not only in terms of the pore water pressures as the main driving force, but also in terms of...

Levee system reliability modeling: The length effect and Bayesian updating

In levee system reliability, the length effect is the term given to the phenomenon that the longer the levee, the higher the probability that it will have a weak spot and fail. Quantitatively, it is the ratio of the segment failure probability to the cross-sectional failure probability. The literature is lacking in methods to calculate the...

A Bayesian hindcasting method of levee failures applied to the Breitenhagen slope failure

Hindcasting of past levee failures enhances insights in the performance and vulnerability of levees. The scarcity of field evidence makes identifying the cause(s) of failure difficult. Under these circumstances, multiple scenarios and model choices are possible to characterise and to model the failure. This paper shows how probabilistic...

Incorporating Observations to Update the Piping Reliability Estimate of the Francis Levee

Piping failure of levees is one of the main contributors to flood risk. Piping occurs when the head difference over a levee results in uplift of the inland blanket, followed by backward erosion in the aquifer due to high local flow velocities. Whether piping occurs, highly depends on local geo-hydrological circumstances which are uncertain due...

Computing the Reliability of Shallow Foundations with Spatially Distributed Measurements

In many geotechnical projects, field data is used to determine the soil parameters. In most instances, however, the statistical analysis is performed ad hoc and the spatial distribution of this data is not (expclitly) accounted for. A more formal statistical approach allows to make better use of the data and combine it in a consistent manner...

On reducing piping uncertainties: A Bayesian decision approach

Dikes and levees play a crucial role in flood protection in deltaic areas such as the Netherlands. Internal erosion piping or under-seepage is a major cause of levee failures and a main contributor to the probability of failure of river levees due to the large (mostly geotechnical) uncertainties. The present thesis investigates how geotechnical...

Re-assessing reliability based on survived loads

The reliability of flood defenses is often dictated by large uncertainties in the hydraulic loading and the structural resistance. Additional information decreases uncertainty, however, acquiring it is often costly. One source of information, even though in many cases readily available, is hardly used – survived loads. This article shows how...