Genetic programming and floating boom performance

• Floating boom performance under waves and currents is investigated.
• Genetic programming is applied for the first time to this problem.
• A mathematical expression to predict the significant effective draft is presented.
• Experimental data from an extensive laboratory campaign is used.
• Fitting results are compared with those corresponding to an ANN model.

In this paper the performance of floating booms under waves and currents is investigated by means of genetic programming (GP). This artificial intelligence (AI) technique is used to establish a mathematical expression of the significant effective draft, an essential parameter in predicting the containment capability of floating booms, and more specifically the occurrence of drainage failure. Obtained by applying GP to a comprehensive dataset of wave–current flume experiments, the expression makes the relationships among the relevant variables explicit – an advantage relative to other AI techniques such as artificial neural networks (ANN). The expression was selected as the most adequate to represent this physical problem from various expressions generated in two different stages in which dimensional and dimensionless variables were considered as input and output variables respectively. The most representative expressions obtained in both stages are presented and compared taking into account their goodness-of-fit, physical meaning, coherence and complexity. In addition, the adjustment with the experimental data obtained with these expressions is also discussed and compared with a previously developed ANN model.