Abstract Cement-treated marine clay has been widely used in ground improvement. Due to its significant spatial variability and complicated constitutive behaviour, the selection of characteristic strength of cemented soil is challenging. According to Eurocode 7, the characteristic value should represent the overall performance of the geotechnical system. And when a reliability-based design method is adopted, “the characteristic value should be derived such that the calculated probability of a worse value governing the occurrence of the limit state under consideration is not greater than 5%”. In this paper, the random finite element analysis was proposed to directly link the spatial variation in the point strength and the overall performance of geotechnical system, which was more directly related to system performance and allowed the probability of failure to be estimated or prescribed for cement-treated soil.
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