Determination of the critical slip surface using artificial fish swarms algorithm

The writers have come across a difficult stability analysis problem where there are several strong local minima. Several well known heuristic global minimum methods fail to locate the global minimum for this case, and the writers finally adopt the artificial fish swarms algorithm to overcome this difficult problem. This optimization algorithm is demonstrated to be effective and efficient for normal problems. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, three difficult examples are considered. The sensitivity of the proposed algorithm with respect to the parameters used for the global optimization algorithm will also be investigated in this paper.