Soils can rarely be described as ideally elastic or perfectly plastic and yet simple elastic and plastic models form the basis for the most traditional geotechnical engineering calculations. With the advent of cheap powerful computers the possibility of performing analyses based on more realistic models has become widely available. One of the aims of this book is to describe the basic ingredients of a family of simple elastic-plastic models of soil behavior and to demonstrate how such models can be used in numerical analyses. Such numerical analyses are often regarded as mysterious black...