Introducing Slide3's New Intelligent Search Method
- Sina Javankhoshdel, Geomechanics Product Manager at Rocscience
With years of experience in developing advanced search techniques, we’ve now expanding our list of search methods with the development of the Intelligent Search for Slide3, which will make it even easier and more efficient for you to find critical slip surfaces in 3D models.
Slide3 has already provided many limit equilibrium search tools, allowing for different slip surface shapes (e.g., ellipsoid, spline) and search methods (e.g., cuckoo search, particle swarm optimization). Introduced most recently, surface altering optimization (also developed in-house) provides you with a unique tool for identifying critical slip surfaces more effectively.
Slide3’s newest innovation is designed to algorithmically focus on regions of interest to provide more information than ever about model safety.
What is Intelligent Search?
Intelligent Search is a novel approach to the global optimization problem of finding the minimum FOS slip surface efficiently. This method builds upon our existing tools for LEM search: spline search surface, particle swarm optimization, and surface altering. Particle swarm is a swarm intelligence method which is widely used in the world of AI.
Powered by a new surface generation algorithm that analyzes your model and generates custom initial solutions, Intelligent Search ensures greater coverage of the search space. It then focuses the search on the identified regions of interest. You can see the regions of interest as a safety map ranging from critical to safe.
With easy-to-use search customization tools, you can increase the resources allocated to search and gather more detailed results.
Intelligent Search provides better coverage than any existing search methods and automates the process of guiding local search to regions of interest. The result is a straightforward tool that you can confidently deploy for your LEM analyses.
In the new release of Slide3, Intelligent Search will be available alongside legacy surface generation methods, Classic Search, and User-Defined Surfaces. These options, along with Regions of Interest tools will be located in the Slip Surface Options.
Reference
Gad, A.G. Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm and Its Applications: A Systematic Review. Arch Computat Methods Eng 29, 2531–2561 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-021-09694
