MS_332 — Applications and new developments of system reliability assessment (theory)

Although there might be a large number of potential slip surfaces in a slope, the factors of these slip surfaces are often highly correlated. For a group of highly correlated slip surfaces, the failure probability of the group of slip surfaces can be approximated by the failure probability of the most critical slip surface in this group, which is called a representative slip surface here. As the number of representative slip surfaces is usually significantly less than the number of possible slip surfaces, it is then possible to estimate the system failure probability using Ditlevsen’s bounds based on the representative slip surfaces.