The role of evolutionary algorithms in soil constitutive models

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.