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