Probability-dependent failure modes of slopes and cuts in heterogeneous cohesive soils

Improbable slope failure is addressed in the framework of reliability analysis of slopes in heterogeneous cohesive soils, as the small subset of realisations that fail without additional measures to trigger failure. The mode of these slope failures, located at the weak tail of the reliability curve, is demonstrated to differ significantly...

System reliability of slopes using multimodal optimisation

Many engineered and natural slopes have complex geometries and are multi-layered. For these slopes traditional stability analyses will tend to predict critical failure surfaces in layers with the lowest mean strength. A move toward probabilistic analyses allows a designer to account for uncertainties with respect to input parameters that...