An intelligent displacement back-analysis method for earth-rockfill dams

An intelligent method for the effective displacement back-analysis of earth-rockfill dams was proposed by combining artificial neural networks and evolutionary calculation. This method employs artificial neural networks, with optimal architecture trained by the evolutionary calculation and Vogl’s algorithm, instead of the time-consuming finite element analysis. In the back analysis, the soil parameters were optimized by performing evolutionary calculations on the tested neural network. The proposed method was verified by applying it to the displacement back-analysis of two projects in China, and the influence of generation number and set size on the simulation ability of neural networks was investigated.