Chapter 5: Retaining walls – reliability-based approach

The deterministic approach is commonly used for designing geosynthetic-reinforced soil retaining walls. This approach ignores the natural variability of the soil properties, which may lead to an uneconomic and/or unsafe design. This chapter presents a reliability-based design approach for geosynthetic-reinforced retaining walls with granular backfills by using the first-order reliability method. The results are also verified with conventional Monte Carlo simulation. Reinforced soil retaining walls are designed considering both internal and external stability requirements. The associated modes of failure are formulated, and the design steps are discussed in detail. The steps involved in the reliability-based design are explained through illustrative examples.