ABSTRACT
The paper deals with the stability of reinforced embankments on soft clay foundations, and presents alternative practical and versatile procedures for easy implementation of the traditionally tedious and iterative limit equilibrium methods of slices, including Bishop’s simplified method and Spencer’s method of slices. The proposed implementation procedures combine the use of constrained optimization techniques and simple programming in the spreadsheet environment, with automatic search for the critical slip circle. The deterministic approach is extended to a probabilistic approach that accounts for the uncertainties and spatial variation of the soil parameters. The advantages of the proposed methods are simplicity, transparency, versatility, accuracy, and ease of implementing stochastic reliability analysis in the ubiquitous spreadsheet platform, notwithstanding the implicit and iterative nature of the limit state functions.
