Developments in reliability-based design for reinforced soil structures

Much progress has been made to migrate from deterministic design approaches for mechanically stabilized earth (MSE) wall structures to (probabilistic) reliability-based design. The latter ensures that the margin of safety against not satisfying a particular limit state is expressed probabilistically. Deterministic factor-of-safety design, load and resistance factor design (LRFD) and partial factor approaches cannot provide the designer with the probability that a limit state is satisfied at time of design. A probabilistic approach provides a more nuanced appreciation of margins of safety in this regard. This extended abstract demonstrates the general approach using as examples the limit states associated with internal stability of geosynthetic MSE walls. An important feature of the general approach is a quantitative link to the deterministic factors of safety used in past practice. The same general approach can be applied to other cases such as reinforced fills over a void, and reinforced granular bases supporting a footing over soft foundations provided model bias statistics are available.