Multi-plane Slope Stability Analysis Based on Dynamic Evolutionary Optimization

The stability analysis of slope is an important and fundamental problem in geotechnical engineering, which is attracting the attention of many engineers and researchers. This paper proposes a dynamic biogeography-based optimization (BBO), to analyze slope stability problems. First, a real-world three-dimensional (3D) slope is described, and it is modeled as multiple two-dimensional (2D) slope planes, each of which is formulated as a single-objective optimization problem. Then a dynamic biogeography-based optimization algorithm, which is called DBBO, is developed by introducing change detection strategy into BBO. This strategy uses sentry solutions to detect their cost changes in different planes of a 3D slope, to reduce the unnecessary function evaluations. The proposed DBBO is applied to solve a case of classical 2D slope stability analysis and a case of 3D slope stability analysis with multiple planes established in this paper. The numerical results show that the proposed DBBO is a competitive algorithm for analyzing various slope stability problems, compared with other traditional methods.