Our expert system aims at the optimum and fast plan making for shield-tunneling works. It is an expert system of applied design problems that integrates such advanced technologies as relational databases , AI, and computer-aided design (CAD). This expert system is able to design and draw a suitable shield machine with an automatic output of design calculations and also specify an optimum contro...

Ground settlement is often the most serious concern when tunneling under an old city with numerous historic monuments. A successful engineering design under these conditions would require getting the most out of the ground strength parameters and avoiding any weakening maneuver throughout the operation. Knowing that surface settlement is highly affected by tunneling parameters in EPB shield tun...

There is a direct relationship between the efficiency of mechanized excavation in hard rocks and that of disc cutters. Disc cutter wear is an important effective factor involved in the functionality of tunnel boring machines. Replacement of disc cutters is a time-consuming and costly activity that can significantly reduce the TBM utilization and advance rate, and has a major effect on the total...

Tunnel construction is a complex technology, with huge number of effective parameters, which cannot be accurately analyzed/designed using empirical or theoretical methods. With the rapid development computer technologies, Soft Computing (SC) approaches have been widely used in tunnel construction. Typically, two common tunneling methods, blasting and mechanical excavation ( e.g ., boring machin...

Original scientific paper Aiming at answering the questions of wear and failure of hob in the rock breaking process, the rock breaking process was simulated in different broken rock conditions by using finite element method. The relationship between normal force, lateral force, rolling force and time was obtained by rock breaking simulation analysis on the single edge disc cutter. The rock stre...

Purpose Tunnel construction using a tunnel boring machine (TBM) entails precise machine positioning and guidance in the underground space. In contrast to traditional laser-based machine guidance solutions, the proposed research aims to develop an automation alternative to facilitate TBMguidance and as-built tunnel alignment survey during tunnelling operations. Method A fully automated system is...

The study of downtime and subsequently machine utilization in a given project is one of the major requirements of an accurate estimation of TBM performance and daily advance rate. Interestingly, while it is very common to report the components of downtime when discussing a tunneling project in the literature; there has not been a great amount of in-depth studies on this topic in the recent year...

The allocation of visual attention is a key factor for the humans when operating complex systems under time pressure with multiple information sources. In some situations, attentional tunneling is likely to appear and leads to excessive focus and poor decision making. In this study, we propose a formal approach to detect the occurrence of such an attentional impairment that is based on machine ...