Reliability Evaluation of Slopes Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

The objective of this research is to develop a numerical procedure to reliability evaluation of earth slope and locating the critical probabilistic slip surface. The performance function is  formulated using simplified Bishop’s limit equilibrium method  to calculate the reliability index. The reliability index defined by Hasofer and Lind is used as an index of safety measure. Searching the critical probabilistic surface that is associated with the lowest reliability index will be formulated as an optimization problem. In this paper, particle swarm optimization is applied to calculate the minimum Hasofer and Lind reliability index and critical probabilistic failure surface. To demonstrate the applicability and to investigate the effectiveness of the algorithm, two numerical examples from literature are illustrated. Results show that the proposed method is capable to achieve better solutions for reliability analysis of slope if compared with those reported in the literature.