Since the introduction of particle swarm optimization (PSO), there has been a dramatic proliferation of published work on the theory and applications of swarm intelligence. However, the use of PSO in slope stability analysis (landslides) has been limited due to factors such as the lack of domain knowledge on the researcher's side and the complexity inherent in the problem itself. To identify issues and provide clear examples for the analysis of slopes and landslides, this chapter will review the existing literature available on the application of PSO to slope stability analysis and discuss a framework to integrate swarm intelligence with the computation of the factor of safety (FS) of slopes. This novel method involves adding swarm intelligence to the existing STABL program (created by Purdue University for general solutions of 2D slopes), and it does not require access to the source codes. It is believed that this method is particularly suitable for complex problems such as slope stability analysis where domain knowledge is important and writing a replacement program with PSO capability from the ground up is too time-consuming and too vulnerable to mistakes. The potential of this approach is of great significance because it could possibly augment and extend the utility of many existing programs in many application fields. To demonstrate the usefulness of this method, we applied it to both theoretical and real-world slopes and landslides and found that they both had good results (but different convergence points). It proved that our approach was both feasible and efficient. We believe that the proposed method will not only enhance the original computer program so that it can solve more problems in its application domain, but it will also benefit the field of swarm intelligence by providing more optimization examples from a wider range of applications.
Adding swarm intelligence for slope stability analysis, Page 1 of 2
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