Efficient and Robust Method for Reliability Analysis of Geotechnical Ultimate Limit States

This paper presents the Hyperspheric Integral Reliability Method (HINT) as an efficient and robust alternative for reliability analysis of geotechnical ultimate limit states. HINT is based on the mechanism of the shear strength reduction method, which is available in major geotechnical finite element method software. HINT utilizes the observation that the factor of safety is not only a pointwise estimate of safety, but also a measure of distance to the failure limit along a radial direction. This observation is used to transform the reliability integral to the hyperspheric coordinate system and formulate computationally efficient estimator of failure probability for geotechnical ultimate limit states. The performance of the method was examined on a practical problem of a shallow foundation on sand subjected to vertical load. HINT demonstrated efficient and robust performance in comparison to the Monte Carlo method.

Keywords: Reliability, Geotechnical, Ultimate, Failure, Probability, Hyperspheric.