Efficient reliability assessment of slope stability with insightful sensitivity analysis concerning the safety factor

Abstract

The limit state functions (LSFs) of slope stability are nonlinear, implicit, or derived from numerical simulations, and additional surrogate models are usually used for its reliability problems. Alternatively, an efficient numerical procedure using a variant of the HLRF-BFGS algorithm is proposed to address this issue without additional surrogate models. This proposed procedure simultaneously conducts reliability assessment and sensitivity analysis concerning the safety factor by suggested calculations of partial derivatives using the finite difference method (FDM). Two highly nonlinear numerical examples are presented to validate its convergence and to investigate the step length of the FDM. Results show that the proposed procedure can get considerable accuracy while the HLRF algorithm cannot converge, and its required iterations are about 30% and 81% less than those of the limited step-size iteration algorithm. In addition, a step length not greater than 0.1 is suggested after investigations. Application to a classical two-layered slope is illustrated. Reliability results show that the proposed procedure can get the same accuracy as those of surrogate models after only 5 iterative steps. Sensitivity results show that the cohesion of the upper soil is the only sensitivity factor, and the most possible potential slide surface lies in the upper soil.