Clustering-based method for locating critical slip surface using the strength reduction method

In slope stability analysis, the strength reduction method (SRM) combined with the finite element method (FEM) can directly obtain the factor of safety (FOS) of complex slopes, but it cannot directly locate the critical slip surface in the plastic zone. Current methods for locating the critical slip surface in SRM are approximations based on visualization techniques, which limits the application of SRM. To solve this problem, a cluster-based method for locating the critical slip surface was proposed in the present study, which can make full use of the various parameters calculated by FEM. In the proposed method, each node in the finite element model is treated as a data point, and its parameters such as stress, strain, and displacement are used as the features of this data point. Then all nodes in the model are classified into two classes using the clustering algorithm, and the boundary between the two classes is the critical slip surface. The effectiveness of the proposed method was demonstrated by applying it to several examples and comparing the results with those of other methods.