Probabilistic Design and Optimization for Tunnels considering Measuring Uncertainties

Uncertainty is an essential property of rock mechanics and engineering, which is of great significance to excavation, design, and control of rock engineering. In this study, an innovative framework of the reliability-based design was developed for the rock tunnel under uncertainty. The convergence-confinement method is used to characterize the interaction mechanism between the support structure and surrounding rock mass. Artificial bee colony (ABC) was adopted to solve the optimization problem in the reliability-based design. The probabilistic properties of rock strength and failure envelope were obtained based on the triaxial compression test data using the Bayesian method. The reliability of the tunnel and support structure was evaluated based on the abovementioned probabilistic properties of rock strength using the reliability analysis method. A circular tunnel was used to illustrate the developed framework, and the procedure was presented in detail. The time of rockbolt installed, the thickness of the shotcrete, length of rockbolt, circumferential space, and longitudinal space of rockbolt were determined and met the constraints of reliability index. Results show that the developed framework can consider the uncertainty for support design in the tunnel. It provides a good and promising way to support design considering the uncertainty of test data using the reliability-based design.