Design of shallow foundations in sands: State-of-the-art

Designs of shallow foundations in granular soils are generally governed by settlement considerations than the bearing capacity ones. The current methods for settlement predictions significantly overestimate the settlements, thus underestimating the allowable design pressures. A new method, using artificial neural networks, appears to give better predictions than the traditional methods. A very versatile software Footset, written in Visual Basic, simplifies the design process by incorporating five different settlement prediction methods.