System Reliability Analysis of Geosynthetic-Reinforced Soil Slopes Under Seismic Conditions

Because of the interaction between geosynthetic reinforcements and soil, as well as the uncertainties in slope and loading parameters, system reliability analysis is required for geosynthetic-reinforced soil slopes. This paper presents a new method for analysing system reliability for geosynthetic-reinforced soil slopes under earthquake loading conditions in consideration of the randomness of earthquake and soil in the framework of pseudo-static method. Multiple failure modes are considered to be a series system and common source random variables are utilized to consider the correlation between different failure modes. The present method overcomes the shortcoming that the single failure mode underestimates the failure probability of reinforced soil slope, and can give a precise solution of the system failure probability. Different failure modes show strong correlation under the same random parameters, which leads the failure probability of the system to be close to the maximum failure probability for a single failure mode.