Digital-twin-enabled JIT design of rock tunnel: Methodology and application

An accurate and timely design of individual processes in drill and blast tunneling is essential for robust and low-risk construction of rock tunnels. Conventional dynamic design method of rock tunnel focuses on the modification of preliminary design schemes using exposed on-site data. A novel conceptual model, just-in-time (JIT) design of rock tunnel, is proposed in this study to denote the intrinsic requirement that tunnel support parameters should be determined in a JIT way when the rock mass are excavated. Specifically, implementation of JIT design of rock tunnel can be divided into three steps, i.e., acquisition of on-site raw data, interpretation of on-site raw data, and aggregation of the interpreted results to obtain a revised design scheme. Time consumption, accuracy and degree of automation are selected as three main indicators to measure the performance of such conceptual model. Moreover, to further improve the efficiency and accuracy, digital twin (DT) is integrated into the implementation of JIT design of rock tunnel, where Scene-Entity-Relationship-Incident-Control (SERIC) modelling method is proposed as a new DT application mode for share and reuse across the domain. The proposed DT-enabled JIT design of rock tunnel is applied into a practical engineering project, where several advanced data acquisition, interpretation and aggregation approaches are integrated using DT. Results show that the design efficiency and accuracy have been largely improved and the proposed method could facilitate information sharing between end-users and stakeholders.