Introduction
Deltares Systems commitment to quality control and quality assurance has leaded them to develop a formal and extensive procedure to verify the correct working of all of their geotechnical engineering tools. An extensive range of benchmark checks have been developed to check the correct functioning of each tool. During product development these checks are run on a regular basis to verify the improved product. These benchmark checks are provided in the following sections, to allow the users to overview the checking procedure and verify for themselves the correct functioning of D-FLOW SLIDE.
The benchmarks for Deltares Systems are subdivided into five separate groups as described below:
- Group 1 chapter 1 - Benchmarks from literature (exact solution)
Simple benchmarks for which an exact analytical result is available from literature. - Group 2 chapter 2 - Benchmarks from literature (approximate solution)
More complex benchmarks described in literature for which an approximate solution is known. - Group 3 chapter 3 - Benchmarks from spreadsheets
Benchmarks which test program features using Excel spreadsheets. - Group 4 chapter 4 - Benchmarks generated by the program itself
Benchmarks for which the reference results are generated using D-FLOW SLIDE. - Group 5 chapter 5 - Benchmarks compared with other programs
Benchmarks for which the results of D-FLOW SLIDE are compared with the results of other programs.
The number of benchmarks in group 1 will probably remain the same in the future. The reason for this is that they are very simple, using only the most basic features of D SETTLEMENT.
The number of benchmarks in group 2 may grow in the future. The benchmarks in this chapter are well documented in literature. There are no exact solutions for these available problems; however in the literature estimated results are available. When verifying D SETTLEMENT, the results should be close to the results found in the literature.
Groups 3, 4 and 5 of benchmarks will grow as new versions of D SETTLEMENT are released. These benchmarks are designed in such a way that (new) features specific to D SETTLEMENT can be verified. The benchmarks are kept as simple as possible so that, per benchmark, only one specific feature is verified.
As much as software developers would wish they could, it is impossible to prove the correctness of any non-trivial program. Re-calculating all the benchmarks in this report, and making sure the results are as they should be, will prove to some degree that the program works as it should. Nevertheless there will always be combinations of input values that will cause the program to crash or produce wrong results. Hopefully by using the verification procedure the number of times this occurs will be limited.
The benchmarks will all be described to such detail that reproduction is possible at any time. In some cases, when the geometry is too complex to describe, the input file of the benchmark is needed. The results are presented in text format with each benchmark description.
The input files belonging to the benchmarks can be downloaded from those pages.
Group 1: Benchmarks from literature (exact solution)
This section describes a number of benchmarks for which an exact analytical solution can be found in the literature.
