Global Sensitivity Analysis for Excavation Stability in Large-Diameter Shield Tunnel Construction

The application of the large-scale slurry-balance shield machine in super-large tunnel excavation (diameter>14m) is much more difficult and risky than the common shield tunneling. In this study, a super-large shield tunnel, Wuhan Yangtze River Road-Rail Tunnel ((WYRT)-T-3) in China, is introduced. Civil information model (CIM) is used to monitor the operation of the super-large shield machine through a thousand parameters. For the site engineers, how to efficiently monitor and interpret the engineering data to guarantee construction safety remains a challenging issue. In order to identify the significant control parameters of the shield tunneling, this study proposed a global sensitivity analysis (GSA) framework for the tunneling data flow in CIM. The results show that (1) the sensitivity results fluctuate greatly, and different soil sections show different input-output correlations, and (2) identifying the most significant and insignificant factors helps to improve the understanding of the model behavior. This research contributes to (1) the body of knowledge by proposing a robust data analysis methodology that can cope with aleatory and epistemic uncertainty, and (2) the state of practice by providing a GSA model to identify the significant control parameters of the shield tunneling.