Development and Evaluation of a Computer-Aided Educational Platform for Advancing Understanding of Slope Stability Analysis

Abstract

Computer-aided educational platforms are of paramount importance as they provide students and engineers with interactive and personalized learning experiences, catering to their individual needs and enhancing their academic growth. This study presents a novel computer-aided educational platform designed by the authors to enhance the understanding of slope stability analysis for young industrial engineers and civil engineering students. The platform is implemented in Matlab, offering a user-friendly graphical interface and a robust framework. It facilitates a comprehensive investigation of landslides, encompassing crucial aspects such as circular slip surfaces and safety considerations based on the Bishop and Ordinary Method of Slices. Furthermore, it enables the determination of minimum safety factors for various methods applied to specific slopes. This paper provides a detailed exposition of each program function, including complete source code, to enhance comprehension of the underlying techniques. To ascertain its accuracy, a slope with given soil properties and geometry were modeled in the Matlab code and the performance of this code was benchmarked against Slide software. It showed only 5 percent error which shows the accuracy of the developed program.