The stability assessment of earth slopes is one of the fundamental calculations in geotechnical engineering. The most commonly used methods for slope stability assessment is based on the limit equilibrium method of slices. In these methods, the potential sliding mass is subdivided into a number of vertical slices. The analysis is based on generation of the trial failure surfaces and evaluation of the safety factor corresponding to each trial surface. The critical failure surface is a surface with the lowest factor of safety. Generally, the problem of locating the critical failure surface...

The stability assessment of earth slope is one of the fundamental problems in geotechnical engineering and may be addressed using both deterministic and probabilistic approaches. The deterministic analysis basically involves the calculation of safety factor for trial slip surfaces and search for a slip surface yielding the lowest factor of safety. In probabilistic approach, the safety of a slope is measured by the reliability index or probability of failure. The problem of searching the minimum factor of safety and minimum reliability index of earth slope can be formulated as an optimization...