Dr Olivier Coussy, Scientist and Engineer of the Mechanics and Physics of Porous Materials (1953–2010)

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the identification of constitutive parameters of the Mohr–Coulomb constitutive model from in situ geotechnical measurements. A pressuremeter curve and the horizontal displacements of a sheet pile wall retaining an excavation are successively used as measurements. Two kinds of optimization algorithms are used to minimize the error function, the first one based on a gradient method and the second one based on a genetic algorithm. The efficiency of each algorithm related to the error function topology is discussed. Finally, it is shown that the use of a genetic algorithm to identify the soil parameters seems particularly suitable when the topology of the error function is complex.