Determination of critical failure surface in slope stability analysis using optimization algorithms (PSO & GA)

The use of limit equilibrium methods are the common approaches for determining of soil slope stability ingeotechnical engineering project. In these methods many researchers tend to find a circular criticalfailure surface for homogeneous soils, but failure surfaces can be non-circular especially for layeredslopes. Finding of critical failure surface of a general soil slope is a difficult problem as the non-convexand multiple minima exist of the safety factor objective function. In this paper simple genetic algorithmand particle swarm optimization methods are employed to find the critical non-circular failure surface.For this purpose the Morgenstern–Price method is used to find the factor of safety. A computer programwas coded by MATLAB for searching the minimum factor of safety. The result of a example is comparedwith stress-deformation method using PLAXIS software for one example. It shows the determined safetyfactors are very close to each other for two methods

کلیدواژه ها:

Critical failure surface ، Factor of safety ، Slope stability ، Particle swarm optimization ، Genetic algorithm