An artificial bee colony algorithm(ABC) for continuous numerical optimization was introduced into searching for the most dangerous failure surface in slope stability analysis.ABC is a global search algorithm
which models the cooperative foraging process of honeybees
and the disadvantage of being easily trapped into local optima of traditional algorithms may be overcome.To improve the performance of ABC on complex slopes
Hooke-Jeeves pattern search operators were introduced into ABC and a Hooke-Jeeves ABC was proposed for stability analysis of complex slopes.Results of four examples show that the proposed method has higher convergence accuracy and reliability.Thus
a concise effective global strategy is provided for searching the critical slip surface and calculating the minimum factor of safety in slope stability.