An Evolutionary Algorithm for Locating the Critical Failure Surface in a Soil Slope

 

Aniruddha Sengupta

Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721302 (India), Email: Sengupta@civil.iitkgp.ernet.in

Anup Upadhyay

Student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

ABSTRACT

Locating the critical failure surface of a soil slope is rendered erroneous and cumbersome due to the existence of local minima points. In case of large soil slopes, engineers face with a search space too large to employ the trial and error method in a computationally efficient fashion. An evolutionary algorithm is proposed to locate the critical surface under general conditions with general constraints. Convergence to any prescribed degree of precision was achieved with the algorithm. The algorithm has been demonstrated to be computationally superior to other optimization routines, Monte-Carlo method and grid-points approach.

Keywords: slope stability, critical failure surface, evolutionary algorithm.

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