The application of reliability analysis in civil engineering is still not very widely applied in geotechnical engineering in general and in application to river dikes, in particular. This paper focuses on the general framework of reliability analysis in geotechnical engineering design and an example for river dike reliability analysis is illustrated. Reliability analysis is related to some other terminology such as: risk assessment, probabilistic design etc. but they all deal with analyzing the relevant uncertain parameters. A river dike ring was examined as a series system with many dike sections which have similar characters (geometry, geotechnical condition, protection area and so on). Considering each dike reach, there are several failure mechanisms such as instability, under seepage, erosion, thus all of them contribute to the dike breach probability with different levels. Practically, an example for a Red river dike section analysis is shown with some reliability methods and the joint probability function for dike segments was formulated.
