Leveraging Modern Programming Languages to Streamline Coastal Engineering Decisions: The Development of the USACE Coastal Engineering Toolkit (UCET)

The Automated Coastal Engineering System (ACES) is an interactive, computer-based design and analysis system for coastal engineering applications. Even though it was designed in the 1990s and is built on legacy software, making it cumbersome to use by today’s standards (e.g, DOS-based with keystroke inputs), ACES continues to be actively applied in the coastal engineering community for planning and finding simple estimates. Using Python, and modern open-source libraries like Param and Panel, we developed the USACE Coastal Engineering Toolkit (UCET), an intuitive, web-based interface that will enable the broader coastal engineering community, academia, non-governmental organizations, and the general public access to a modernized version of the ACES tools, which now include the latest scientific advancements. UCET allows users to access coastal engineering tools for addressing common needs in the field, export summary reports, and produce high-quality visuals for functional areas related to wave prediction, wave theory, wave transformation, structural design, littoral processes, wave runup, transmission, and overtopping. An agile development cycle is enabling UCET to continually improve, with input and feedback from practicing coastal engineers actively being incorporated. In addition to the successful application of UCET for coastal applications, future work is expanding the UCET workflow and framework to the needs of the broader hydraulic community, leading to unified platforms, efficient problem solving, and increased collaboration between computer scientists and engineers.