Programming methods for pre-design of coastal structures

The coastal areas are facing serious erosion problems and, consequently, an increasing investment to build and maintain shore protection structures is expected. Coastal works involve very high costs, being important to search for optimal solutions. Furthermore, the existence of numerous pre-design formulations amplifies the need to understand the influence of the represented parameters in the final results. So, the main purpose of this work was the development of a software (XD-Coast Xpress Design of COAstal STructures), using C# language, which the main goal is the calculation of armour layer blocks unit weight, for different formulations and types of structures. The XD-Coast was developed in order to facilitate calculation processes, allowing a quick comparison between several alternative solutions, and to allow sensitivity analysis about variables involved in the calculations. Therefore, it was intended that the model was resourceful, with an intuitive and easy graphical interface. In addition, it allows not only isolated calculations, but also repeated calculations with increment of several calculation steps for some variables, generating tables of results, exportable to Excel files. These tables allow understanding the influence of each parameter in armour layer blocks unit weight. A sensitivity analysis was performed and is presented, for all formulations and various parameters. Finally, XD-Coast model purpose is to be a good tool to obtain optimized solutions during the pre-design phase of a structure.