The idea of PGA stream computations for soil slope stability evaluation

Designing and constructing of road embankments, deep excavations, landslide and snow avalanche predictions or profiling construction sites in slanting terrain need slope stability evaluations. Determination of a safety factor and the position of a potentially critical slip surface is one of the essential issues in classical and modern soil mechanics, which still remains a very important problem in engineering practice. Most of the stability evaluation methods, i.e. based on limit equilibrium assumptions, need optimization, which can be successfully realized with the assistance of a genetic algorithm. The authors propose a variational approach with a four-step technique to determination of the critical height of a slope, which can be treated as an alternative and variant method to the generally applied limit equilibrium and/or finite element methods. Some common obstacles encountered while adapting classical optimization procedures have been solved by application of a parallel genetic algorithm. Substantial acceleration of computations has been achieved by introducing SIMD stream technology, which generally relies on modern graphics processing units. Examples of the results of a slope stability analysis performed using the fast parallel computation technique are also presented.