The subject of this book is rapidly gaining importance in geomechanics as many practitioners and researchers in this field are recognizing the usefulness of numerical and computer methods as a tool for treating some difficult and otherwise intractable problems in geomechanics. Such recognition has come about through more than a decade of development, refinement and application of numerical methods in various areas of geotechnical engineering. This development has resulted in a large body of literature scattered through many technical journals and conference proceedings. Many references are hard to locate and often practitioners and research students have difficulty distinguishing the contributions in the literature which have more lasting impact. This book is timely in bringing together under one volume many of the important contributions and systematically presenting the application of numerical methods in various areas of geomechanics. It is a collection of contributed chapters by a number of well-known researchers and practitioners. Most of the major contributions in the field have been discussed in this book and many more are referenced in the extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter.