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Abstract
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This paper develops a dual-indicator discrete method (DDM) for evaluating the system reliability performance of long soil subgrade slopes. First, they are segmented into many slope sections using the random finite element method, to ensure each section statistically contains one potential local instability.
Soil subgrade is widely used in railway engineering worldwide, such as in the South Coast rail line in Australia [1] and the Lanzhou-Xinjiang rail line in China [2]. The instability of subgrade slopes is one of the main risk sources of railway operations due to the potential for huge social and economic impacts and even passenger casualties. For example, the Ingenheim derailment accident in France caused by a landslide due to heavy precipitation (see Fig. 1) caused 21 injuries and serious damage to vehicles [3]. Rainfall is one of the most significant triggering factors for slope failures in many regions [4]. For long subgrade slopes composed of spatial variable soils, the resisting moment of the potential local failure surface at different locations varies significantly, and it is highly likely to encounter discretely distributed local instability events along the length direction [5]. Since any local slope instability event may cause traffic disruption, the reliability assessment of subgrade slopes should be treated as a system problem. For the system reliability evaluation of subgrade slopes, the key target is to estimate the probability that the actual number of local instability events does not exceed an acceptable threshold, such as ... |