Application of Particle Swarm Optimization in Evaluating the Reliability of Soil Slope Stability Analysis

The objective of this research was to show the development of a numerical procedure to evaluate the reliability of earth slope and locating the critical probabilistic slip surface. The performance function is formulated using simplified Bishop’s limit equilibrium method to calculate the reliability index. The reliability index defined by Hasofer and Lind was used as an index of safety measure. Searching the critical probabilistic surface that was associated with the lowest reliability index was be formulated as an optimization problem. In this paper, particle swarm optimization was applied to calculate the minimum Hasofer and Lind reliability index and critical probabilistic failure surface. To demonstrate the applicability and to investigate the effectiveness of the algorithm, three numerical examples from the literature were illustrated. Results showed that the proposed method was capable of achieving better solutions for reliability analysis of slope compared with those reported in the literatures.