Abstract
Variational stability analysis is a new method that can determine the safety factor as well as the critical sliding surface which satisfies the kinematical constraints. Theoretically it can be applied to nonhomogeneous problems, however, its use is scare because of the difficulties in analytical application. A well known variational stability formulation may be of Baker et al., but there are some controversy with its application. At first, we pointed out the variational approach affords the extremum by discussing on the equality of the method to the upper bound calculation. Then we developed a numerical code based on Baker's theory and examined its applicability to the slope stability and compared the results with some of the conventional limit equilibrium methods. It is concluded that results of variational method agree quite reasonably with those of Spencer method and is proved to be more practical for less time consuming.
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