It is necessary to properly terminate according to the specific situation, and determine how many iterative steps to perform in the discrete element calculation process in advance. Currently, specifying the maximum number of steps is used as the most common method. Although this method is simple, it is not suitable in some simple and complex cases, because too few iterative calculation steps would bring about inaccurate numerical calculation results, and too many iterative calculation steps would entail unnecessary calculations. To date, there has been much research work that attempts to solve the above problem associated with determining when the iterative process could be terminated. For example, [PERSON] et al. [42] combined the energy-based discrete element method with time-series analysis to determine when the discrete element iterative calculation process could be terminated. [PERSON] et al. [43] analyzed the influence of the discontinuity of rock mass joints on slope stability, and conducted a sensitivity analysis on different input parameters. The global displacement of the rock slope was studied, and the global displacement vector diagram was drawn to judge when the slope was damaged. Although this method is reasonable, it is suitable for only some simple slopes. However, it is difficult to judge the position where the vector map has changed significantly for complex slopes. [PERSON] et al. [44], [PERSON] et al. [45], and [PERSON] et al. [46] determined when slope failure occurs through the value of the mean and dispersion of displacement. Recently, [PERSON] et al. [47] proposed a discrete element modeling method based on displacement statistics to investigate the stability of a jointed rock slope with a potential sliding surface. The procedure of the displacement-statistics-based method is as follows. 1. The potential sliding surface is roughly determined according to the geological data and conditions;
2. The vertices around the determined potential sliding surface are established before the discrete element iterative calculation;3. The displacements of the vertex at the specified iteration interval are obtained; then the mean, standard deviation and the ratio of mean to standard deviation are calculated; 4. The convergence of the ratio of mean to standard deviation is analyzed. However, in the above displacement-based method, it is necessary to determine the position of the potential sliding surface before the discrete element iterative calculation. In fact, determining the position of the potential sliding surface is difficult for some slopes in many cases; the position of the sliding surface would directly affect the final calculation results. In addition, the displacement-based method only considers the displacement of rock blocks around the potential sliding surface, but does not consider the mass or weight of rock blocks around the potential sliding surface. To solve the above problem, a discrete element method based on energy correlation coefficient is proposed to analyze the deformation and failure of jointed rock slopes. The proposed method is a generalization of the displacement-based discrete element method. This proposed method considers not only the mass or weight of the block, but also the displacement of the block. Compared with the energy-based method [42], the proposed method in this paper considers both the temporal and spatial correlation between all blocks, which is more comprehensive. Meanwhile, the calculation cost and efficiency of the proposed method are basically the same as those of the displacement-based method and the energy-based method. Our contributions can be summarized as follows. 1. An energy-based criterion is proposed to terminate the iterative process of discrete element modeling. 2. A discrete element modeling method based on the energy correlation coefficient is proposed to analyze the failures and deformations of jointed rock slopes. 3.