Spatial-temporal fusion network for maximum ground surface settlement prediction during tunnel excavation

The maximum ground surface settlement prediction is a complex problem as the settlement depends on plenty of intrinsic and extrinsic factors. To obtain the approximate range of the settlement, a hybrid prediction dataset including the geological and construction parameters is built using spatial and temporal series according to the sampling methods. The settlement prediction task is transformed into a multi-modal and multi-variate series prediction task. Hence, a spatial-temporal fusion network (STF-Network) is proposed. The spatial-temporal fusion mechanism is firstly designed to establish the spatial-temporal fusion map, which makes spatial and temporal series interact earlier. Then, the 3D residual unit structure is designed to capture the features of temporal series and spatial-temporal fusion map, and two fully-connected layers are established to capture the spatial structural information. Finally, the final output is merged by the three components. The experimental results for STF-Network demonstrate the superiority over state-of-the-art methods.