The design of offshore and coastal infrastructures, sand nourishment and other ’soft’ coastal interventions require the analysis of environmental variables (e.g. wind, waves, rainfall) that can potentially cause the failure of such structures. Processes such as overtopping, beach erosion, and coastal flooding can result from a combined action of two or more physical processes. Traditional infrastructure design practices assume the highest load previously experienced as the design load, regardless of possible interactions between variables (or processes). This may lead to a misrepresentation of critical design loads. This thesis presents a methodology for defining infrastructure design loads accounting for their interdependence. The methodology is general and is based on regular vines. Vines are graphical tools for defining high dimensional distribution functions through pair-copula construction. With this premise in mind, the main effort was concentrated in formulating a series of steps to integrate several stages of the design: from the processing of raw data up to the choice of design loads for any specific design purpose. The vine-based methodology was applied to the design of a breakwater in Galveston Bay, Texas. This application showed that accounting for the interdependence between design variables provides a more comprehensive description of the physical system acting on the infrastructure. However, the vine-based method is computationally demanding. Hence, the applicability of this methodology should be evaluated on a case by case basis. In parallel, the possibility to define goodness of fit test for vine-copula based on the concept of tree-equivalent classes is explored. The focus is on model selection strategies based on graphical and statistical properties of the vines. The main motivation to investigate model selection strategies for vines is the considerably large computational time needed to fit all regular vines in more than 6 nodes to the data. In this thesis, a novel algorithm is developed to facilitate the implementation of vines in higher dimensions (vines with more than 6 nodes). This algorithm significantly reduces the computational effort to select a regular vine by allowing the user to test only a subgroup of vines in n-nodes constructed on specific characteristics of the vines in (n-1)-nodes. ... Read more

In spite of the major and broad consequences of adverse climate change impacts on ports in general, relatively little and relevant detailed research is made available within public domain. Several studies have addressed climate impacts on transportation infrastructure however very few focus on ports and supply chain. Ports are considered critical infrastructure that serve as a catalyst for economic growth and development of a country. Their importance is not only on a national (or regional) level, but they act as gateways to trade and constitute essential nodes in the global supply chain. The topic of this thesis on \textit{Climate Change Impact Assessment on Ports} is very broad to tackle within only 9 weeks (the length of this research). Therefore, the focus has been set on seaports within the Netherlands and more specifically, the Port of Rotterdam as main example. This thesis aims to advance research on climate change impact assessment on ports and supply chains. To achieve the aforementioned, a few research questions have been defined to help steer the research into the right direction: (1) What is known about the main impacts of climate change on ports and supply chains? (2) Which assets are vulnerable to the main impacts determined in sub-research question 1? (3) What are the state of the art strategies to perform a climate change impact assessment? And what are the available resources (frameworks, methods, software)? (4) Which knowledge gaps have been identified while answering sub-research questions 1,2 and 3? (5) How can one address the gaps identified in sub-research question 4? The methodology of this thesis has two main parts: The literature study and the expert interviews. The interviews were a very important part of this research. That is because this thesis aims to present the needs from the users perspective, to motivate researchers to continue with the exploration of this topic. Formulating the right questions to ask the experts and identifying which of the 12 experts could provide the best answer to understand the needs from different port users perspective, was the most challenging part of this thesis. The results of this thesis are research topics on the broad subject of climate change impact assessment on ports an supply chains. Due to time constrains, only 3 research topics are presented in more detail with the corresponding suggested approach. These three topics have been prioritized among the rest based on expert's opinions on what climate change issues are the most urgent (for further details see 2.4.2 \& 4.1-4.3). These topics are: (1) Developing an Integrated Stochastic Model to Test Climate Change Resilience on Ports, (2) Investigating Methods to Identify \& Quantify Supply Chain Disruptions due to Climate Change Cascade effects and (3) Developing a Method to Promote Awareness for Climate Change Resilient Ports. Nevertheless, chapter 6 presents a list of other potential research topics that can also be of interest to researchers. The recommendations for further research on the topic of climate change impact assessment on ports and supply chains are to follow the suggested research topics descriptions in chapter 6. Furthermore, to explore probabilistic models to tackle uncertainty issues and to understand the multivariate dependencies within ports and supply chains. Finally but most importantly, this research should be extended internationally, not only focusing on Dutch experts, to have a global perspective on the problems and the identified knowledge gaps posed on this thesis. Other recommendations can be found in chapter 7. ... Read more