Designing for dangerous waves – a new ‘Adaptive Screening’ method to predict extreme values of non-linear marine and coastal structure responses to waves

Predicting extreme values of strongly non-linear hydrodynamic responses (such as wave impact loads) is crucial for ensuring the safety and reliability of marine and coastal structures. However, this task is challenging due to the complexity and rarity of these responses. Existing methods are often limited to weakly non-linear responses or are very computationally expensive. This paper presents a new multi-fidelity method called ‘Adaptive Screening’, designed to efficiently predict extreme values of strongly non-linear wave-induced responses. These values are critical inputs for structural design and reliability analysis. Adaptive Screening combines elements of screening, multi-fidelity Gaussian Process Regression, and adaptive sampling. We validate its effectiveness through three applications: predicting the most probable maxima of second-order wave crests, vertical bending moments on a ferry, and green water impact loads on a containership. Our results demonstrate that Adaptive Screening outperforms conventional brute-force methods, achieving comparable accuracy in predicting extreme values while significantly reducing high-fidelity simulation times (especially for the most non-linear cases). Like many alternative methods, Adaptive Screening relies on a response-dependent low-fidelity indicator variable. We also show that the method performs well with realistic indicators for a range of applications. The test cases indicate that Adaptive Screening is very promising for the strongly non-linear responses it was designed for.