ABSTRACT
Complex engineering problems e.g. fluid-soil interaction for geotechnical problems, can be simulated using the finite-element method by considering the different phases in the foundation ground. The constitutive equations are described by the theory of porous media, in which the interaction between the involved phases is considered. The averaging of the phases over a representive elementary volume is carried out using the concept of volumetric content. The complexity and size of three-dimensional engineering problems in the field of fluid-soil interaction makes the simulation numerically very costly, especially when the results are to be improved by fully adaptive methods.

In this paper, we present a finite element formulation for the computation of a two-phase model for the fluid-soil interaction and the improvement of the results with the adaptive p-refinement as well as the parallel implementation in a distributed software system using mobile software agents.

An example of practical interest confirms the suitability and the new possibilities arising from this modern approach.