Reliability Analysis of Earth Slopes Using Differential Evolution

This paper presents a new method to simultaneously search for the minimum reliability index and the critical probabilistic slip surface of earth slopes. By introducing the Hasofer-Lind reliability index, the probabilistic slope stability analysis problem is modeled as a constrained optimization problem. A recently proposed intelligent global optimization algorithm differential evolution with a penalty function is adopted to solve the constrained optimization problem. Numerical results on two slopes show that the propose technique is efficient and practical to reliability analysis of earth slopes.