Bahía Blanca in Buenos Aires province is located 600 kilometres south of Buenos Aires city. The port complex of Bahía Blanca has the second largest throughput in Argentina considering tons, mainly attributed to the agro – and petrochemical industry. The port handles containers as well, however with an average of 30 thousand TEU/year this throughput is rather small. The authority of the Port of Bahía Blanca sees opportunities to increase container throughput in the port due to recent developments in the region. The container throughput is estimated for 2040, considering the petrochemical cluster and fruits. Four different trends show a container throughput of respectively 30, 155, 250 and 360 thousand TEU/year. The capacity of the container terminal is estimated at 50 thousand TEU/year, based on the equipment, the dwell time and the terminal area. The terminal should improve when throughput will increase. To start, number of calls and call size are assumed based on future throughput, decreasing the average dwell time for export containers. Additionally, a larger quantity and more advanced equipment is required to handle the increase in throughput. Lastly, the terminal area itself can be increased significantly from 8ha to 22ha in its maximum configuration. The increase in storage area allows the capacity to grow from 50 thousand TEU/year to 215 thousand TEU/year. It is important to realize that further expansion of the terminal is not possible and a new location has to be considered. A multi criteria analysis in combination with a financial analysis on the possible location showed that two out of four possible new locations are suitable for the development of a new container terminal. The new container terminal should have the capacity to handle the expected container throughput generated locally. The possibility to attract additional cargo to the port was researched as well, since the Port of Bahía Blanca has an advantageous depth compared to the Port of Buenos Aires. However, on the short term it is not expected that Bahía Blanca can profit from the draught limitations in Buenos Aires since port calling cost are almost the same, Buenos Aires is located conveniently and not operating at capacity and current shipping routes are not expected to change their routes majorly.

Structures have to meet a particular level of safety. Therefore, in the European design codes (Eurocodes), three reliability classes (RC) are introduced based on the potential consequence of failure of the structure. For each of the RC a maximum allowable probability of failure is introduced, corresponding to a reliability index. In recent research by Roubos et al. (2018), it is suggested that the marginal costs of safety investments for quay walls is quite low. Therefore, it is questionable whether the current reliability classes and the corresponding set of partial factors, as defined in the Eurocodes and CUR 211, are functional for quay walls. This gave rise to the present study. This thesis investigates the relationship between the construction costs and the reliability index for two quay walls located in the Port of Rotterdam; 1) a double anchored combi-wall and 2) a combi-wall with a relieving platform. In this study, more insight is acquired into the relationship between the construction costs and the reliability index of quay walls. Firstly, the two quay walls are designed semi-probabilistic in RC1, RC2 and RC3, using D-Sheet Piling for the double anchored combi-wall and using Plaxis 2D for the combi-wall with a relieving platform. Thereafter, the construction costs of these designs are calculated and compared. Besides that, the influence of the partial safety factors, which are defined in the Eurocodes and distinguish the reliability classes, on the construction costs is quantified. The same was done for the influence of three of the critical failure mechanisms; ‘passive resistance inadequate’, ‘sheet pile profile fails’ and ‘tension member anchorage fails’. For these failure mechanisms the reliability indices are estimated using the reliability analyses module of D-Sheet Piling, which is based on a probabilistic level II analysis, the First Order Reliability Method (FORM). It appeared that the marginal costs of safety investments for both quay walls is relatively low, even significantly lower than suggested by Roubos et al. (2018). It followed that the differentiation in construction costs between the reliability classes is considerably less than the differentiation in construction costs between quay walls in practice. Therefore, it seems that the current reliability classes and the corresponding set of partial safety factors, as defined in the Eurocodes and CUR 211, are non-functional for quay walls. Besides that, it can be concluded that when designing a quay wall, the determination of the angle of internal friction of the soil strongly influences the construction costs, followed by the surface- and crane loads. The influence of the cohesion of the soil and the bollard load on the construction costs is very small. Furthermore, the influence of the failure mechanisms ‘passive resistance inadequate’ and ‘tension member anchorage fails’ on the construction costs of the double anchored combi-wall is relatively low. Therefore, it is suggested that the reliability index of the quay wall can be increased in a economically attractive manner by increasing the length of the tubular piles of the combi-wall or the steel sectional area of the anchor rod. Due to these influences, it can be economically beneficial to increase the target reliability index of the failure mechanism ‘passive resistance inadequate’ and decrease the target reliability index of ‘sheet pile profile fails’.