Abstract

Tunnel boring machine (TBM) is widely used for tunnel excavation in hard rock and soft ground. In the perspective of TBM-based tunneling, one of the main challenges is to drive the machine optimally according to varying geological conditions, which could significantly lead to saving highly expensive costs by reducing the total operation time. Generally, drilling investigations are conducted to survey the geological ground before the TBM tunneling. However, it is difficult to provide the precise ground information over the whole tunnel path to operators because it acquires insufficient samples around the path sparsely and irregularly. To overcome this issue, in this study, we proposed a geological type classification system using the TBM operating data recorded in a 5 s sampling rate. We first categorized the various geological conditions (here, we limit to granite) as three geological types (i.e., rock, soil, and mixed type). Then, we applied the preprocessing methods including outlier rejection, normalization, and extracting input features, etc. We adopted a deep neural network (DNN), which has 6 hidden layers, to classify the geological types based on TBM operating data. We evaluated the classification system using the 10-fold cross-validation. Average classification accuracy presents the 75.4% (here, the total number of data were 388,639 samples). Our experimental results still need to improve accuracy but show that geology information classification technique based on TBM operating data could be utilized in the real environment to complement the sparse ground information.