DETERMINATION OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE PARAMETERS ON SCOUR DEPTH AT SEAWALLS USING GENETIC PROGRAMMING (GP)

Scour at coastal structures is one of the major problems that may lead to their failure. Therefore, predicting accurate scour depth at coastal structures is important. Extensive laboratory studies have been conducted predicting the maximum scour depth. These studies have developed their formulas using the limited set of effective input parameters. Using irrelevant parameters can lead to complex models that are very difficult to interpret and implement as compared to the modelsevolved with the most significant parameters. Sensitivity analysis can be used for determination of the most important input parameters. In this study, the genetic programming (GP) built-in power in determination of the most significant parameters and omitting the non-significantparameters during the models evolution has been used for sensitivity analysis. In order to verify the GP models performance in determination of the most significant parameters, the Liong et al. (2002) [1] proposed approach has been utilized. The results indicated that the relative scour depth at seawalls is mostly affected by the reflection coefficient and the water depth at the toe. Moreover, the influence of mean diameters of bed sediments is negligible.

DETERMINATION OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE PARAMETERS ON SCOUR DEPTH AT SEAWALLS USING GENETIC PROGRAMMING (GP) Keywords:

Coastal structures , breaking waves , Genetic programming , Scour depth , Regression-based equations