Modeling tunneling-induced ground surface settlement development using a wavelet smooth relevance vector machine

Accurate prediction of ground surface settlement is necessary for effectively controlling the settlement that develops during tunneling. Many models have been established for this purpose by extracting the relationship between the settlement and the factors that influence it. However, most of the models focused on the maximum ground surface settlement and do not involve dynamic and real-time predictions. This paper investigated how tunneling-induced ground surface settlement developed using a smooth relevance vector machine with a wavelet kernel (wsRVM). Various factors that affect this settlement, including geometrical, geological and shield operational parameters were considered. The model was applied to earth pressure balance (EPB) shield-driven tunnels. The results indicate that the prediction model performs well and that the distribution of the predictions can provide a measure of the prediction uncertainty. Unlike conventional methods that requireadditional efforts to determine relevant model parameters, the proposed method can optimize the parameters in the training process. The results of the parametric study conducted show that the model performance can be improved by the optimization and that the method can serve as a simple tool for practitioners to use in estimating ground surface settlement development during tunneling. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.