Effects of spatial variability of soil parameters on settlement of a shallow foundation

The sources of uncertainties in reliability analysis are usually classified to four categories, namely physical uncertainty, model uncertainty, statistical uncertainty and gross error. In the actual situation, however, what we observe is combined result of all of these uncertainties. The purpose of this study is to quantitatively evaluate the physical uncertainty (i.e. spatial variability of soil properties), taking the settlement and the differential settlement prediction of a flexible square shallow foundation on statistically homogeneous elastic ground, as an example. 3-D conditions have been examined when calculating the differential settlement. The method introduced to evaluate the spatial variability of the ground property is Monte Carlo simulation (MCS).