Abstract:Actual position often deviates from the original design position in the installation of artificial reefs for the construction of sea ranching program. How to estimate the deviation error at unit artificial reef and artificial reef groups was the precondition of evaluation of artificial reef building quality. In this paper, three different types of artificial reefs were chosen to do the research, which were harbor artificial reef area, island-reef area, open artificial reef water area. Five indexes were used to calculate and analyse the deviation error between actual artificial reef and designed artificial reef at unit artificial reef level, which were gravity center, peripheral area, overlapping area, monocase number, and average spacing between monocases. The results showed that the error of each index was mainly normal distribution, however, error of index in one artificial reef area may follow different types of reasonable fitting distribution. The same error index of different artificial reef areas may have the same fitting distribution, and the fitting distribution of different error indexes may be the same. Gravity center, overlapping areas and monocase number have the same limit error in different areas, the standardizing distribution scope were[0, 1],[0, 1],[0, 0.451] respectively. Limit error was different from other indexes, generally, distribution scope of peripheral area was[0, 1], and distribution was[0, 1] and[0, 0.890] separately of the average spacing between monocased and total error. Based on the analysis of distribution pattern and distribution scope of artificial reef, the deviation errors between actual artificial reef and designed artificial reef can be divided and can be used to evaluate the quality of artificial reef building.