Locating critical failure surface using meta-heuristic approaches: a comparative assessment

Abstract

Slope stability analysis is performed to access the slope failures and to design safe and optimal slopes with regard to safety and reliability and for saving economic loss. The prime objective of this study is to find endangered areas and observe their safety factors and failure mechanism under which any structured pattern of slope tends to fail soon. An important aspect is to achieve this by locating the critical failure surface associated with a minimum factor of safety. Limit equilibrium analysis is one of the most established procedures which computes the factor of safety under all kinematic and geometric constraints. Locating the critical failure surface is very cumbersome and becomes a difficult constrained global optimization problem due to the presence of discontinuous function and multiple local minima points. The classical techniques are also unable to converge to a valid solution due to high computation complexity. In the proposed work, an analysis has been performed using meta-heuristic approaches due to their fast and elegant efficiency. A comparative study has been carried out to ensure the applicability and reliability of the methodology to evaluate the minimum factor of safety. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated by solving three different benchmark problems from the literature, where the implementation results confirm the higher stability analysis and acquire a more efficient and acceptable result over relevant existing methods. © 2019, Saudi Society for Geosciences.