Slope stability analysis using multiple parallel profiles

During the last 20 years, there has been a dramatic proliferation of published work on the theory and applications of PSO. However, the use of PSO in slope stability analysis has been sporadic. Recently there has been a renewed interest in this particular issue because of the growing number of natural disasters involving landslides. In this paper, the authors briefly reviewed the previous work involving using PSO in the analysis of slope stability. In addition, a new automated approach was proposed to replace the traditional method of choosing only one cross-sectional profile to represent the entire slope. With the help of laser scanning and the slope dissection program, many high precision profiles can be generated at the same time for repetitive analysis. Using a real landslide slope near the Houshanyue hiking trail as an example, it was demonstrated that lower FS could be found locally using PSO, and the lowest FS could be determined globally by summarizing across all profiles.