A real-time interaction platform for settlement control during shield tunnelling construction

Settlement control has always been the first concern for all the participants of shield tunnelling construction when the shield machine passes through buildings, especially in urban areas. However, owing to insufficient information communication of the participants, abnormal settlement usually results, against which reasonable settlement control measures are difficult to take. Therefore, a real-time mobile interaction and coordinated management platform was designed and developed with the instant messaging (IM) tool. The key ingredients of the platform are timely auto-sending of monitoring data and information flow in the coordinated management mechanism. The platform can inform all participants timely of the settlement as well as the tunneling situation. With this platform, problems encountered during shield tunnelling construction can be solved by IM group discussion. The real-time interaction platform has been validated and verified in the project of Nanning metro line 1 crossing beneath Nanning railway station, which realized the settlement control goal of a maximum value of −4 mm.