Case-based system for slope design

A key part of slope design is the review of past examples of slopes in similar ground conditions. This paper details the development of the SlopeSafe computer program which uses case-based reasoning to formalise this process. The program, written in Visual Basic, draws on a case-base of nearly 3000 case histories of successful and failed slopes to give an indication of the likely success of a proposed slope by matching its geometry and ground conditions to the slopes held in the case-base. XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been used to store the data and a specific set of tags has been defined to provide a standard way of storing slope information. The system has been identified by practising engineers as having the potential to be a very useful design tool.