Soil properties vary spatially even within homogeneous layers due to depositional and postdepositional processes. The spatial variability of soil properties was originally taken into account directly by Lumb (1970) in slope stability analyses. In the last two decades, a large portion of published research papers have tried to explicitly model the spatial variability of soil properties in geotechnical engineering. In the first decade, research mainly focused on showing the importance of modelling the spatial variability in reliability analyses of geomechanical problems. In the last decade, a rapid development was observed including quantitative risk assessment of geotechnical structure failure, and conditional simulations using site investigation and field monitoring data. This mini-symposium will focus on the modelling of spatial variability in the reliability and risk analyses of geomechanical problems. Depending on the number of abstract submissions on the reliability and risk analyses of geomechanical problems accounting for the soil spatial variability, we anticipate offering 2 conventional sessions, each with 6, 15 minute presentations. Contributions will include, but not limited to, the following areas:
(1) Theoretical advances and methodologies developments in the discretization/simulation of random fields;
(2) Random field modelling of non-stationary characteristics of soil properties;
(3) Conditional random field modelling or geostatistics-based modelling of soil spatial variability;
(4) Random field modelling coupled with finite element, limit analysis, limit equilibrium, material point and smoothed particle hydrodynamics methods;
(5) Applications of spatial variability modelling in a wide range of geotechnical problems.
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