The authorities of the Port of Genoa have requested the construction of a new vertical breakwater for the Sampierdarena canal, as well as the subsequent demolition of part of the existing breakwater. The reason for this project is the need to expand the size of the canal, to allow larger vessels to safely use it. A choice is made for a vertical-type breakwater, i.e., a concrete caisson placed on top of a rubble mound foundation. The main goal of this thesis is to provide a preliminary probabilistic design of a cross-section of the new breakwater at the port of Genoa by applying a vine-copula model for the wave climate in a Monte-Carlo simulation.

All possible regular vines were obtained by permuting the six equivalence classes for 5 nodes. 13 different copula types and all 480 possible 5-node regular vines were fitted on extreme wave data. The best vine-copula was selected based on the lowest AIC value. The performance of the vine-copula model was compared to that of an independent model.

Offshore waves were transformed to onshore waves by applying SWAN. A MATLAB loop-function was made to automate this process. Prof. Goda's method was used for determining the wave-induced loads on the vertical breakwater. 10 failure modes were considered in total. A Monte-Carlo simulation was built in MATLAB. Using the Monte-Carlo simulation, several dozen designs were tested in an iterative matter to find an optimized design. The proposed preliminary cross-sectional design fulfilled all design criteria.