Numerical techniques for the computation of strict bounds in limit analyses
have been developed for more than thirty years. The efficiency of these techniques
have been substantially improved in the last ten years, and have been successfully
applied to academic problems, foundations and excavations. We here extend
the theoretical background to problems with anchors, interface conditions, and
joints. Those extensions are relevant for the analysis of retaining and anchored walls,
which we study in this work. The analysis of three-dimensional domains remains
as yet very scarce. From the computational standpoint, the memory requirements
and CPU time are exceedingly prohibitive when mesh adaptivity is employed. For
this reason, we also present here the application of decomposition techniques to
the optimisation problem of limit analysis. We discuss the performance of different
methodologies adopted in the literature for general optimisation problems, such as
primal and dual decomposition, and suggest some strategies that are suitable for the
parallelisation of large three-dimensional problems. The propo sed decomposition
techniques are tested against representative problems.Peer ReviewedPreprin
