Abstract:A new kind of chaos harmony search method is developed for the local factor of safety analysis of soil slopes. The new method utilizes the grandiosity and chaos parameters to explore the design space for better solutions. In addition,the harmony procedure used in basic harmony search method is also used to exploit the design space. The equivalent number of better solutions are introduced into the harmony memory. The method proceeds until the maximum iterating time is equal to the pre-specified value. The chaos harmony search method is applied to the progressive failure analysis of soil slopes using local factor of safety. The comparisons of the computed results with those obtained by basic harmony search method and those from published literatures suggest that the proposed method is applicable to soil slope stability analysis.