OPTIMUM SELECTION OF NUMBER AND LOCATION OF GEOTECHNICAL BOREHOLES BASED ON SOIL RESISTANCE

Digging of geotechnical boreholes and soil resistance tests are time-consuming and expensive activities. Therefore selection of optimum number and suitable location of boreholes can reduce cost of their drilling and soil resistance tests. In this research, a model which is consisting of geo statistics model as an estimator and an optimized model is selected. The kriging calculates the variance of the estimation error of different combinations from available geotechnical boreholes. In each combination, n is number of considered boreholes and N is number of available boreholes (N>n). At the end, the best combination is selected by genetic algorithm (the error variance of this combination is minimum). Also the Kean Shahr of Ahvaz city (in Khuzestan province, Iran) is selected as case study in this research. Location of selected boreholes is in points that soil resistance of these points represents mean soil resistance of total region. Optimum number of boreholes is 15. Also results show that location of selected boreholes depends to soil resistance and diameter and length of applied piles are not important for this purpose.