By writing the limit state analysis as an optimisation problem, and after
resorting to suitable discretisations of the stress and velocity field, we compute strict
bounds of the load factor. The optimisation problem is posed as a Second Order Conic
Program (SOCP), which can be solved very efficiently using specific algorithms for
conic programming. Eventually, the optimum stress and velocity fields of the lower and
upper bound problem are used to construct an error measure (elemental gap) employed
in an adaptive remeshing strategy. This technique is combined with an additional adaptive
nodal remeshing that is able to reproduce fan-type mesh patterns around points
with discontinuous surface loads. We paticularise the resulting formulation for twodimensional
problems in plane strain, with VonMises andMohr-Coulomb plasticity. We
demonstrate the effetiveness of the method with a set of numerical examples extracted
from the literature
