RAPID: Adaptive management of geotechnical construction in urban areas

Recent research has resulted in advances in techniques to predict, monitor, and control ground movements during excavation. The purposes of this proposal is to employ adaptive management techniques for geotechnical construction to provide real time updates of performance predictions and to develop design procedures that are applicable to urban excavations that use existing structures as lateral support. This proposed research builds upon the results of several of NSF-supported projects in which the optimization techniques were developed, automated monitoring technologies were employed, full-scale field performance was quantified in detail, sophisticated constitutive models were employed and parameter identification techniques were quantified at deep excavation sites. The adaptive management technique has not yet been applied to excavations in real time, primarily for a lack of reliable automated means to measure lateral movements with depth adjacent to an excavation, and for ambiguity of the causes of ground movements with respect to construction activities and structural responses.