The aim of this paper is to illustrate the significance of two levee underseepage failure mechanisms, heaving and piping, that need to be assessed within the levee design process. This paper explores the use of a probabilistic framework for assessing these two failure mechanisms. The paper begins by introducing a simple, deterministic approach for calculating the factor of safety for each failure mode. An advanced first order second moment (AFOSM) technique was then employed to evaluate the probability of failure via each of the failure modes that were assessed. From these analyses, the selection of appropriate acceptance criteria for failure of levees by an underseepage mechanism is demonstrated to be an important research area where future work is needed.
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