Optimization techniques have drawn much attention for solving geotechnical engineering problems in recent years. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is one of the most widely used population-based optimizers with a wide range of applications. In this paper, we first provide a detailed review of applications of PSO on different geotechnical problems. Then, we present a comprehensive computational study using several variants of PSO to solve three specific geotechnical engineering benchmark problems: the retaining wall, shallow footing, and slope stability. Through the computational study, we aim to better understand the algorithm behavior, in particular on how to balance exploratory and exploitative mechanisms in these PSO variants. Experimental results show that, although there is no universal strategy to enhance the performance of PSO for all the problems tackled, accuracies for most of the PSO variants are significantly higher compared to the original PSO in a majority of cases.

近年来，优化技术已引起人们对于解决岩土工程问题的广泛关注。粒子群优化（PSO）是应用最广泛的基于种群的优化器之一，具有广泛的应用范围。在本文中，我们首先详细介绍PSO在不同岩土问题上的应用。然后，我们提出了使用PSO的几种变体的综合计算研究，以解决三个特定的岩土工程基准问题：挡土墙，浅基础和斜坡稳定性。通过计算研究，我们旨在更好地理解算法行为，特别是在这些PSO变体中如何平衡探索和开发机制方面。实验结果表明，