Probabilistic Approach on Railway Infrastructure Stability and Settlement Analysis
Sangho Lee
International Journal of Railway, vol. 6, no. 2, pp.45-52, 2013
Abstract : Railway construction needs vast soil investigation for its infrastructure foundation designs along the planned railway path to
identify the design parameters for stability and serviceability checks. The soil investigation data are usually classified and
grouped to decide design input parameters per each construction section and budget estimates. Deterministic design method
which most civil engineer and practitioner are familiar with has a clear limitation in construction/maintenance budget control,
and occasionally produced overdesigned or unsafe design problems. Instead of using a batch type analysis with predetermined
input parameters, data population collected from site soil investigation and design load condition can be statistically
estimated for the mean and variance to present the feature of data distribution and optimized with a best fitting probability
function. Probabilistic approach using entire feature of design input data enables to predict the worst, best and most probable
cases based on identified ranges of soil and load data, which will help railway designer select construction method to save the
time and cost. This paper introduces two Monte Carlo simulations actually applied on estimation of retaining wall external
stability and long term settlement of organic soil in soil investigation area for a recent high speed railway project.
Keyword : Probabilistic, Monte Carlo, Simulation, Wall, Stability, Settlement, Mean, Variance, Stochastic |