Influence of Soil Heterogeneity on the Contact Problems in Geotechnical Engineering
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authros discuss the influence of soil heterogeneity on the contact problems in Geotechnical Engineering by analyzing plane strain contact problem.
The proposed approach is interesting but there are some points that the authors should better discuss.
The abstract should be revised for underlying main findings of the analysis. The authors should be better described the novelties of their approach with respect to existing ones. In particular, the author should discuss limitation and cons of the examined approaches that they aim to overcome. Furthermore, the authors should provide more details and discussion about the obtained results. The Discussion section also needs to be improved by analyzing the outcome of evaluation section.
I suggest to further analyze more recent approaches about the examined topics. In particular, I suggest the following papers to further investigate influence in other domains (i.e. social networks) in the introduction section:
1) Diffusion algorithms in multimedia social networks: A preliminary model. In IEEE/ACM International Conference, 2017; pp.844-851.
Finally, I suggest to perform a linguistic revision.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors
The presented work seems to be interesting but needs further significant corrections and considerations to become an acceptable paper on this journal.
1- Abstract is too short and does not present important points. It should be between 250 to 300 words and concisely mention the problems of previous works and novelties in this paper.
2- Similarly, the introduction has very poor structure and lack of literature review. Usually in the chapter of introduction the background and needs of study of damage assessment methods have to be highlighted and prepare readers to go further. Then your second chapter should be literature review where you present an overview on the previous works and the main problem statements of work and how it can be improved or overcome on it.
3- Please provide more information about the selected location and data repository and how they have been collected.
4- Results and discussion are not properly organized and it has to show the significant achievements of the proposed method and discuss each table and figure properly and in detail.
5- As you have lots of abbreviations, I recommend to provide a table of abbreviations according to MDPI style.
6-It could be great if you do a comparison between your proposed method and some of the available or common other methods to show the efficiency of it.
7- It would be useful if you provide a general framework or flowchart that how others can implement or use your proposed method for their assessment purposes.
8- In general, your conclusion is good and you can discuss a bit again about the achievements and novelty of your proposed method.
9- In total, the main problem of you paper is the lack of literature review and you can present some new developed methods for soil interaction or effect of it to attract the attention of readers and show a wide view of your works. Below are some of the recent works, where I found them new and useful to add and make your paper much more interesting:
-The effects of base motion variability and soil heterogeneity on lateral spreading of mildly sloping ground
-Effects of soil heterogeneity on subsurface water movement in agricultural fields: A numerical study
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I think that the authors have addressed all my concerns.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors
Many thanks for your efforts and I believe it is not in an acceptable level.
