The Dutch Water board revised their guidelines for the safety assessment of dikes in 2017. A major change for the assessment of macro-stability is the use of the SHANSEP method to estimate the strength of impermeable cohesive layers. The failure probabilities are estimated with a deterministic analysis using limit equilibrium methods. The use of design values and safety factors to account for uncertainty is basic and proven to be conservative leading to over engineering.

In this thesis, it is investigated how the SHANSEP method can be incorporated to the more advanced Random Finite Element Method. It is found that three random fields for SHANSEP parameters S,m and POP are required. The random fields do not show particular trends in mean or standard deviation. A random field generator is coded in Python. a simple version of the in-house FEM is modified to read the generated random fields. This code is used to test various geotechnical assumptions.

A final version of the assumptions is coded into a more advanced version of the simulator to do the comparison. The output of the FEM code are the FOS and failure mechanism of a single evaluation with a combination of three random fields. A mean and standard deviation of the FOS results are calculated. The probability of failure is estimated by the area under the probability density function of a lognormal distribution for values below unity. The probability of failure of the deterministic case is estimated using the First Order Second Moment method.

The results show that the probability of failure is overestimated in a FOSM analysis by one order of magnitude compared to the most conservative RFEM simulation. It is expected that this difference is even higher for the more conservative deterministic approach the Dutch guidelines prescribe. The slip surfaces of RFEM were found to be similar to their deterministic counterpart. The RFEM slip surfaces went through local weak zones in random fields.

It is recommended to Dutch policy makers to investigate the use the random finite element method. Although conservatism is preferable in safety assessments, an conservatism of this significance compared to the RFEM approach is unnecessarily costly.