comparison of different probabilistic methods for analyzing slope stability

the purpose of this study is to compare the results of different probabilistic methods such as the perturbation method, stochastic finite element method (sfem) and monte carlo method. these methods were used to study the convergence of direct approach for slope stability analysis and are developed for a linear soil behavior. in this study, two dimensional random fields are used and both the first order reliability method (form) and limited step length iteration method (lslim) have been adopted to evaluate the reliability index. the study found that the perturbation method of the second order is easy to apply using the field’s theory because accuracy is reached even with different coefficients of variation of input variables, while the spectral finite element method yields accurate results only for high levels of solution development.