Abstract
The calculation of earthwork plays a major role in the planning and design phases of many civil engineering projects, such as seashore reclamation; thus, improving the accuracy of earthwork calculation has become very important. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for finding a cubic spline surface with the free boundary conditions, which interpolates the given three-dimensional data, by using B-spline and an accurate method to estimate pit-excavation volume. The proposed method should be of interest to surveyors, especially those concerned with accuracy of volume computations. The mathematical models of the conventional methods have a common drawback: the modeling curves form peak points at the joints. To avoid this drawback, the cubic spline polynomial is chosen as the mathematical model of the new method. In this paper, we propose an algorithm of finding a spline surface, which interpolates the given data, and an appropriate method to calculate the earthwork. We present some computational results that show the proposed method, of the Maple program, provides better accuracy than the method presented by Chen and Lin.