TR053: Measurement Planning System for Information Integrated Construction

In Japan owing to the high-growing economy, the land problem has become serious. Hence each major general construction company has been trying to accomplish three big projects. These are development projects of sea, ground and sky space in order to extend our living space. One of them is called GEO-FRONT. This is a project digging into the ground to make large underground towns. The GEO-FRONT project is so big to tackle that many kinds of obstacle must be faced.

The underground is an unknown world because the ground has many uncertainties. Ground is not homogeneous and is composed of of many kinds of materials such as water, slip surfaces, soil and so on. The uncertainties of the ground is apparently wider than other man made materials such as concrete and steel. These uncertainties can't be completely considered in the design phase. These are serious problems underlaying on the base of geotechnical engineering.

In order to analyze the response of the ground, experimental equations and experienced relations have been used for a long time, and still are relied on. Even though it is small part of the ground, to predict or analyze it using results of ground surveyor soil tests is very difficult because of gaps that exist between assumptions of analysis techniques, such as Finite Element Method (FEM), and that of soil tests. It is much more the case that for larger or deeper areas that we have never been to, big problems will occur immediately. For instance, the mechanism of earth-pressure in deep ground is not still clear. Therefore if some theories of earth-pressure, which are based on the our experience of shallow areas, are used to calculate the thickness of tunnel wall, additional experiments or discussion would be needed.

In these days, the technique of ground numerical analysis is going further than that of monitoring, survey and soil testing. Therefore good measurement methods or surveying systems to bridge these gaps have been expected rather than basic equations or numerical analysis techniques. As one of those ways, there is a technique of feeding back the data picked up at a construction site into next step using back analysis in order to predict future phenomenon much more accurately. This builds a bridge between design and the actual project. This technique is called OBSERVATIONAL CONSTRUCTION, and it is part of INFORMATION INTEGRATED CONSTRUCTION (I I C) technology.