Simplified approach for reliability-based design against basal-heave failure in braced excavations considering spatial effect

This paper presents a simplified approach for reliability analysis of basal heave in a braced excavation considering the spatial variability of soil parameters, The first-order reliability method (FORM) with a variance reduction technique is employed to model the spatial variability in lieu of the conventional random field modeling (RFM). The proposed approach yields results that are comparable with those obtained using the conventional RFM approach that relies on Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed approach requires much less computational effort, is easy to use, and has potential as a practical tool for reliability-based design that has to deal with spatial variability of soils.