System reliability analysis of soil slopes with general slip surfaces using multivariate adaptive regression splines

A data driven multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) based algorithm for system reliability analysis of earth slopes having random soil properties under the framework of limit equilibrium method of slices is considered. The theoretical formulation is developed based on Spencer method (valid for general slip surfaces) satisfying all conditions of static equilibrium coupled with a nonlinear programming technique of optimization. Simulated noise is used to take account of inevitable modeling inaccuracies and epistemic uncertainties. The proposed MARS based algorithm is capable of achieving high level of computational efficiency in the system reliability analysis without significantly compromising the accuracy of results.