Modelling of spatial variability of soil undrained shear strength by conditional random fields for slope reliability analysis

Conditional random field model can make best use of limited site investigation data to properly characterize the spatial variation of soil properties. This paper aims to propose a simplified approach for generating conditional random fields of soil undrained shear strength. A numerical method is adopted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. With the proposed approach, the analytical posterior statistics of spatially varying undrained shear strength conditioned on the known values at measurement locations can be obtained. The conditional random field model of undrained shear strength is constructed using the field vane shear test data at a site of the west side highway in New York and the probability of slope failure is estimated by subset simulation. A clay slope under undrained conditions is investigated as an example to illustrate the proposed approach. The effects of borehole location and borehole layout scheme on the slope reliability are addressed. The results indicate that the proposed approach not only can well incorporate the limited site investigation data into modelling of the actual spatial variation of soil parameters by conditional random fields, but also can capture the depth-dependent nature of soil properties. The realizations of conditional random fields generated by the proposed approach can be well constrained to the site investigation data. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.