Reliability Analysis of Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil Walls

Geosynthetic reinforced soil walls have been widely used for earth retention and stabilization in many geotechnical applications. In the traditional design of geosynthetic reinforced soil walls, Allowable Stress Design (ASD) is used to address the uncertainties. However, it cannot explicitly consider the uncertainties in a systematic way in the design process; especially geotechnical uncertainties are typically at high levels and problem-specific. Traditional methods usually result in over-conservativeness, inconsistence, and empiricism in the design practice. Recently there has been a trend of the application of reliability methods for design of geosynthetic reinforced soil walls to explicitly address uncertainties in the design process and account for the actual safety and reliability level of a given design. In this paper, a series of reliability analyses of geosynthetic reinforced soil walls are performed, results from which can provide a useful decision making tool for selection of suitable design of geosynthetic reinforced soil walls based on target reliability levels. A case study is presented to demonstrate the significance of the proposed framework