LAUSR

The soil heterogeneity has a significant impact on the stability of geotechnical structures. The inherent variability of parameters in one soil type comes from different deposition and tectonic conditions. Furthermore, geological uncertainty could be described by the distribution of varying soil types. Therefore, considering both the inherent variability and geological uncertainty of soil parameters, we introduced a coupled Markov chain (CMC) model to simulate the soil heterogeneity utilizing the field borehole data. Additionally, we initiated an extended Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS) model-based Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). This technique is used to overcome the limits of the traditional response surface method that assumed both order and type of polynomials to perform the probabilistic analysis, which occurred in slope reliability evaluation. Our results have shown that the proposed MARS-based MCS approach could effectively conduct the probabilistic analysis with enough accuracy. The comparison of the probabilities of failure obtained by the MARS-based MCS and the other methods suggested that both the robustness and high accuracy of the MARS-based MCS have been discussed in different spatially varied soils. Even though the differences between these three approaches are insignificant, the reliability results obtained by the MARS-based MCS agree better with the results of the direct MCS results. Thus, these calibrated results indicated that the proposed MARS-based MCS could perform the system reliability analysis effectively and accurately.