The Contribution of Particle Swarm Optimization to Three-Dimensional Slope Stability Analysis

Abstract

Over the last few years, particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been extensively applied in various geotechnical engineering including slope stability analysis. However, this contribution was limited to two-dimensional (2D) slope stability analysis. This paper applied PSO in three-dimensional (3D) slope stability problem to determine the critical slip surface (CSS) of soil slopes. A detailed description of adopted PSO was presented to provide a good basis for more contribution of this technique to the field of 3D slope stability problems. A general rotating ellipsoid shape was introduced as the specific particle for 3D slope stability analysis. A detailed sensitivity analysis was designed and performed to find the optimum values of parameters of PSO. Example problems were used to evaluate the applicability of PSO in determining the CSS of 3D slopes. The first example presented a comparison between the results of PSO and PLAXI-3D finite element software and the second example compared the ability of PSO to determine the CSS of 3D slopes with other optimization methods from the literature. The results demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of PSO in determining the CSS of 3D soil slopes.

A Comprehensive Survey on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications

“…A real test model of partition wall had been created as well as an equivalent numerical finite-element model. Kalatehjari et al [287] applied PSO in 3D slope stability problem to determine the critical slip surface of soil slopes. In the contrast, past publications were limited to 2D slope stability analysis.…”

Selection and Configuration of Sorption Isotherm Models in Soils Using Artificial Bees Guided by the Particle Swarm

“…These conventional algorithms are highly sensitive to the fitness function (error measure) and on the initial guess. Of late, nature-inspired or swarm intelligence search techniques are used as an alternative to the conventional methods for solving several optimization problems in geoenvironmental engineering [11][12][13][15][16][17][18].…”

“…These algorithms overcome several limitations of conventional, deterministic techniques. Thus, these global search techniques are widely applied in geotechnical engineering for several optimization problems [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. However, these techniques often prematurely converge to local optimum 2 Advances in Artificial Intelligence solution and may not generate the same solution in different runs due to stochastic nature of the algorithm [18].…”

Profile Orientation and Slope Stability Analysis

“…optimization technique that has been applied to many different fields to solve many different types of problems, including the stability analysis of earth slopes. For earth slopes, PSO was primarily used to compute the minimum FS and to determine the most critical sliding surface [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. In addition to theoretical framework development, a number of real-world engineering case studies were also available.…”

“…However, most of these PSO-related studies were based on 2D profiles, while none used laser scanning and STABL in the analysis. Of these studies, only one considered 3D analysis of slope stability by means of a general rotating ellipsoid shape [17]. Nevertheless, the method was entirely different from the approach taken in this study, which analyzed the target slope in directions ranging from 0 ∘ to 359 ∘ .…”