A Comparative Study of Various Commercially Available Programs in Slope Stability Analysis

The objective of this paper is to study the effect of different slip surface search techniques on the factors of safety obtained using the limit equilibrium slope stability methods. This objective is accomplished by comparing results from the finite element method, the linear grid method, the rectangular grid method, and the Monte-Carlo searching techniques. It has been shown that the limit equilibrium method is a very powerful method as long as an appropriate selected searching technique is used. In addition, the selected slip surface search technique highly influenced the location of the critical slip surfaces as well as the value of the calculated factors of safety. Results from different commercially available slope stability programs were compared.