Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE A - Call for Papers "SPECIAL ISSUE: IoT & AI-based Intelligent Construction and Maintenance of Shield Tunnels"

Overview:

With the development of urbanization and the scarcity of soil resources, shield tunnel excavation has become the prior choice in urban underground engineering because of its short construction cycle and high degree of mechanization in many countries and regions. Due to the lack of intelligent sensors and innovative technologies to monitor the operation state of shield machine under the complex geological condition, the construction quality of shield tunnels mainly depends on the experience of the operators. In addition, the performance degradation and damage accumulation will inevitably occur in shield tunnels under the long-term influence of the complicated service environment and external loads. The traditional maintenance of the tunnels needs the engineers to inspect the service state of tunnel structure manually and regularly, which is costly and inefficient.

In the past few decades, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) has provided an efficient and suitable alternative route for academics and engineers to realize the intelligent construction and maintenance of shield tunnel projects. IoT can connect the variable sensors effectively and provide the intelligent processing platform to implement the intelligent control of shield tunneling. IoT sensors can monitor the operation state of the shield machine and the health level of tunnel structure automatically and upload the data into the internet in real time. AI not only has excellent performance in processing high dimensional variables which can help find the internal relationship of relevant parameters, but also has powerful computing power with remarkably less computational cost and noticeably higher operability.

Scope:

This special issue will collect the research works on the intelligent construction and maintenance in shield tunnel engineering. Focal points of the session include, but are not limited to:

Intelligent construction, such as smart IoT sensors for construction monitoring, automatic control of shield machine, etc.;
Smart maintenance, such as new testing instruments and innovative monitoring sensors for shield tunnel linings, disease diagnosis and prognosis based on structural health monitoring, etc.;
Traditional and hybrid machine learning methods;
Computer vision, digital image processing, and deep learning;
Innovative IoT sensors and monitoring technologies;
AI and big data analysis.

Guest Editors:

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