Application of biogeography based optimization to locate critical slip surface in slope stability evaluation

Abstract

Finding the critical slip surface in a soil or rock is very cumbersome and a difficult constrained global optimization problem. In presence of large solution search space and high computational complexity, the classical techniques are unable to find an optimal solution. In this paper, a meta-heuristic approach called Biogeography-based optimization (BBO) algorithm is applied to perform slope stability analysis, where Spencer method from limit equilibrium analysis is used as objective function for the algorithm. The validation and performance of the algorithm has been shown by solving a benchmark case study from the literature where, the implementation results confirm higher stability analysis and acquire more efficient result over relevant existing methods.