Abstract
Evaluating the reliability of a slope is a challenging task because the possible slip surface is not known beforehand. Approximate methods via the First-Order Reliability Method (FORM) provide efficient ways of evaluating failure probability of the "most probable" failure surface. The tradeoff is that the failure probability estimates may be biased towards the unconservative side. The Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) is a viable unbiased way of estimating the failure probability of a slope, but MCS is inefficient for problems with small failure probabilities. This study proposes a novel way based on the importance sampling technique of estimating slope reliability that is unbiased and yet is much more efficient than MCS. In particular, the issue of the specification of the importance sampling Probability Density Function (PDF) will be addressed in detail. An example of slope reliability will be used to demonstrate the implementation of the new method.