Automated assessment of slope stability

Abstract

Landslides pose a risks to the communities settled in their vicinity. They pose a threat to human lives and significant economical damage to the affected communities. As the scientific community agrees that the climate change will further increase the risks associated with landslides, it is important to develop a reliable, cost effective and widely applicable technique to assess the stability of the potentially unstable slopes. Such a technique could allow to create an early warning systems meant to help evacuate the communities at risk before the landslide event happens. There have been many studies applying different methods of achieving this goal. This study will apply electrical resistivity tomography to investigate the subsurface and use machine learning methods in the form of supervised and unsupervised learning to interpret the measurements. The electrical resistivity tomography is a widely applied technique to investigate the stability of slopes. It can determine the water table in the subsurface, which plays the crucial role in the stability of the slopes. However, the manual interpretation of the electrical resistivity tomography profiles is a time-consuming and cumbersome task. In order to develop a reliable early warning system both the measurements and their interpretation have to be automatized. The first one has been already achieved. There are systems available that can perform electrical resistivity tomography automatically and continuously. In order to automatize the second part, the following research investigated the capability of machine learning to interpret resistivity profiles alongside with various methods of improving the accuracy of the results. The results show that machine learning is capable of performing this task. Some limitations were identified and guidelines for the preprocessing of the data were proposed. Several areas that require further investigation were identified.