Analysis of slope stability and detection of critical failure surface using gravitational search algorithm

Slope stability analysis is one of the most sophisticated and challenging task in the field of mining and Geo-technical engineering. Locating the critical slip surface associate with a minimum safety factor is a major concern in determining the stability analysis of earth slopes such as embankments, road-cut slope, excavation, dam, retaining walls, landfills, etc. It's become a difficult constrained global optimization problem due to the availability of discontinuous function and presented multiple local minima points in a large solution search space. Trial and error methods also can not employ due to large search space. Thus, classical techniques are incapable to estimate valid and optimal solution due to its high computational complexity. In this paper, a meta-heuristic approach called a gravitational search algorithm (GSA) is adopted for analyzing the factor of safety. From the quantitative evaluation and implementation result, it is reported that the GSA algorithm could acquire result more consistent with higher precision. The algorithm is examined by solving a benchmark study of the literature while, simulation design for geometry and slope model is validated using ‘slide a rock-science’ software tool.