The German Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration (WSV) maintains about 7235 km of waterways whose shores are mainly secured by loose or grouted armor stones. To enable the WSV to make optimal use of its resources, taking into account boundary conditions such as economic efficiency and nature protection requirements, an extension of the current German design concept towards maintenance is required. In this paper a “classical” reliability analysis is conducted to investigate the probability of armor stone displacements along German inland waterways. Subsequently, it is proposed to use the obtained probabilities of armor stone displacement in Markov chain simulations to relate the former to the number of ship passages and time. Eventually, this may allow estimating maintenance intervals in regard to actual traffic density. The methodology is illustrated with traffic observations along four artificial inland waterways in Germany. The results are discussed in relation to the consequences for embankment maintenance and applicability in practice.