Abstract
This paper describes a systematic way of simultaneously identifying the ambient pore pressure and the rigidity index (=G/s$\_$u/) of soil by applying an optimization technique to the piezocone dissipation test result. An ambient pore pressure and optimal rigidity index were determined by minimizing the differences between theoretical excess pore pressures developed by Randolph ＆ Wroth(1979) and measured excess pore pressures from piezocone using optimization technique. The effectiveness of the proposed back-analysis method was examined against the well-documented performance of piezocone dissipation tests (Tanaka ＆ Sakagami, 1989), from the viewpoints of proper determination of selected target parameters and saving of test duration. It is shown that the proposed back-analysis method can evaluate properly the ambient pore pressure and the rigidity index by using only the early phase of the dissipation test data. Also, it is shown that with the optimized rigidity index and ambient pore pressure the proposed back-analysis method permits the horizontal coefficient of consolidation to be identified rationally.