Project partner Research Driven Solutions presented CLARION at CERI 2026, highlighting the project’s work on climate-resilient port infrastructure and quay wall assessment.
Behnam (Mohammad) Fereidoonnezhad delivered the presentation on behalf of RDS. During the event, he shared research developed within CLARION to support a more reliable evaluation of quay walls. These structures play a key role in port safety, cargo operations and transport continuity. Therefore, understanding how they behave under operational and climate-related pressures is essential for resilient port planning.
Improving quay wall assessment
The presentation focused on a numerical approach that helps assess the soil properties behind quay walls. In particular, the work explores how finite element modelling, inverse analysis and surrogate modelling can support the estimation of soil stiffness from wall displacement responses.
This approach can reduce the need for repeated simulations. As a result, it can help engineers and infrastructure managers make more informed decisions when assessing quay wall performance.
Moreover, the research addresses a common challenge in existing port infrastructure. Soil conditions can vary along a quay wall, and engineers cannot always measure them directly at every location. For this reason, structural response data can offer valuable support when estimating key soil parameters.
Supporting climate-resilient ports
By improving confidence in model-based predictions, the approach can strengthen the assessment of infrastructure performance under operational loading conditions. In turn, this can support safer and more resilient port operations.
This contribution also reflects CLARION’s wider objective. The project develops practical and transferable solutions that help European ports improve resilience, safety and sustainability in the face of climate change.
In this context, CLARION brings together partners from research, engineering, technology and port operations. Together, they work on topics such as smart quay walls, corrosion management, flood impact assessment, digital twins, emergency response and multimodal transport resilience.
Next steps for the research
The work presented at CERI 2026 represents an important development step. At this stage, the research uses simplified modelling and synthetic displacement data. However, future activities will extend the approach towards more realistic soil conditions, multiple soil layers and field monitoring data.
This will help strengthen its potential application to real port infrastructure and support the long-term resilience of European ports.
The CLARION project thanks Behnam (Mohammad) Fereidoonnezhad and Research Driven Solutions for presenting this work and contributing to the dissemination of the project’s research results.
The full paper is available on this page.
