Practical guidelines for the multivariate assessment of the structural risk in coastal and off-shore engineering

•Practical guidelines for a multivariate structural risk assessment are outlined.•Monte Carlo procedures are introduced to bypass possible analytical problems.•Strategies for coastal and off-shore structural multivariate design are shown.•Procedures for data randomization and scenario generation are discussed.•Comparisons with traditional strategies are presented.

The present work is of methodological nature, and represents an addendum to the guidelines for multivariate analysis and design in coastal and off-shore engineering recently presented in literature. The target of the paper is to provide a general framework for the multivariate assessment of the risk of failure by using a structural approach. Shortly, Monte Carlo procedures are adopted in order to estimate, for given Return Periods, the design structural variable(s) of interest, which may depend on a set of multivariate random inputs. As an advantage, the distribution of the structural variable(s) is computed by means of non-parametric techniques, which replace the fit of parametric distributions, an awkward task involving arbitrary choices. A practical case study is used to show the application of the procedures, and to compare the structural-risk approach proposed here with the strategies adopted in previous papers.