Ontology for estimating excavation duration for smart construction of hard rock tunnel projects under resource constraint

Although stochastic programming and feedback control approaches could efficiently mitigate the overdue risks caused by inherent uncertainties in ground conditions, the lack of formal representations of planners' rationales for resource allocation still prevents planners from applying these approaches due to the inability to consider comprehensive resource allocation policies for hard rock tunnel projects. To overcome the limitations, the authors developed an ontology that represents the project duration estimation rationales, considering the impacts of ground conditions, excavation methods, project states, resources (i.e., given equipment fleet), and resource allocation policies (RAPs). This ontology consists of 5 main classes with 22 subclasses. It enables planners to explicitly and comprehensively represent the necessary information to rapidly and consistently estimate the excavation durations during construction. 10 rule sets (i.e., policies) are considered and categorized into two types: non-progress-related and progress-related policies. In order to provide simplified information about the remaining durations of phases for progress-related policies, the ontology also represents encoding principles. The estimation of excavation schedules is carried out based on a hypothetical example considering two types of policies. The estimation results reveal the feasibility, potential for flexibility, and comprehensiveness of the developed ontology. Further research to improve the duration estimation methodology is warranted.