Abstract:
The complex nature of soil behaviour must be modelled with advanced
constitutive models. However, some difficulties can be highlighted that hinder the use and the development of advanced constitutive soil models in geotechnical research and
practice: the objective evaluation of the performance of model variants, the objective
comparison between different models, the information on the effect of individual
parameters (material model constants and initial values of internal variables) on the
model’s response and the calibration of the model’s parameters. Evolutionary algorithms
appear to play an important role in the development, testing and application of advanced
constitutive models. Several papers have been published concerning only the
determination of the constitutive models’ parameters by means of evolutionary algorithms.
Despite their success when applied to model calibration, this paper illustrates that they
play an important role, not only in determining the parameters values, but also in the
development, improvement, testing, comparison and application of advanced constitutive
models.