The GA-cal software for the automatic calibration of soil constitutive laws: a tutorial and a user manual

TL;DR

GA-cal is a Fortran software that automates the calibration of soil constitutive laws using genetic algorithms, demonstrated on hypoplastic sand models with experimental data, and is easily extendable for various tests and models.

Contribution

This work introduces GA-cal, a user-friendly software tool for automatic calibration of soil models using genetic algorithms, with a tutorial and open-source code.

Findings

Successfully calibrated the Sand Hypoplastic law with experimental data.

The software can be extended to other models and tests.

Provides a practical tool for soil model calibration.

Abstract

The calibration of an advanced constitutive law for soil is a challenging task. This work describes GA-cal, a Fortran software for automatically calibrating constitutive laws using Genetic Algorithms (GA) optimization. The proposed approach sets the calibration problem as a regression, and the GA optimization is used to adjust the model parameters so that a numerical model matches experimental data. This document provides a user guide and a simple tutorial. We showcase GA-cal on the calibration of the Sand Hypoplastic law proposed by von Wolffersdorff, with the oedometer and triaxial drained test data. The implemented subroutines can be easily extended to solve other regression or optimization problems, including different tests and constitutive models. The source code and the presented tutorial are freely available at \url{https://github.com/FraJoMen/GA-cal}.