Identification of Soil Mechanical Parameters by Inverse Analysis Using Stochastic Methods

Abstract

Abstract The mechanical parameters of the soil that must be introduced into geotechnical calculations, in particular those carried out by the Finite Element Method, are often poorly understood. The search for the numerical values of these parameters so that the models best reflect the observed reality constitutes the inverse analysis approach. In this article, we are interested in the identification of the mechanical parameters of the soil based on the principle of inverse analysis using the two methods of stochastic optimization, the genetic algorithm and the hybrid genetic algorithm with Tabu search. Soil behavior is represented by the constitutive soil Mohr-Coulomb model. The identification relates to the following two parameters: The shear modulus (G) and the friction angle (φ). The validation of these two stochastic optimization methods is done on the experimental sheet pile wall of Hochstetten in Germany. The results obtained by applying the genetic algorithm method and the hybrid genetic algorithm method for the identification of the two Mohr-Coulomb parameters (G, φ) show that the hybridization process of the genetic algorithm combined with the Tabu search method accelerated the convergence of the algorithm to the exact solution of the problem whereas the genetic algorithm alone takes a much longer computation time to reach the exact solution of the problem.