MONITORING

Managing
monitoring data
With data flowing from all directions and multiple sources, how can
clients, contractors and designers ensure they are seeing what they
need to see? Kristina Smith finds out about a number of different
solutions to managing and presenting data.
For other projects, bespoke systems offer a
COPENHAGENS NEW CITYRINGEN
more reliable and cost-effective solution for
METRO line consists of 15.2km of twin
those firms with the right capabilities.
bored tunnels, 17 new stations and four
A newly emerging tool which promises
shafts. Circling the city centre, the line
some exciting applications in several fields
passes near some of its most historic 18th
of civil engineering, is analytics. Arup,
and 19th century buildings including the
Atkins and QuantumBlack have developed
Marmorkirken, or marble church. The city
the AIM (Adaptive Instrumentation and
also has a high water table, which must be
Monitoring) application that integrates
managed for excavation while its level is
analytics to interpret monitoring data.
maintained underneath existing buildings.
Analytics have been used in other
Contractor Copenhagen Metro Team
industries such as Formula 1 and are
(CMT), a joint venture of Salini Impregilo,
designed to work with huge and fast flows
Tecnimont Civil Constuction and Seli, must
of data. Analytics for tunnelling applications
keep a close eye on many different
can help spot patterns and trends and
elements: movements of ground and
optimise monitoring regimes.
buildings, loads on struts, deflections of
retaining walls, data from four
TBMs, stress and strain in the
Figure 1: The basics of Sample Analytics
tunnel lining segments, water
levels and water flows, noise and
vibration.
Due to the size of the project
and the technical requirements,
we decided we had to go to
someone who had the knowhow to do automated
measurements and a database
which met most of the
specifications, and could be
easily extended to add the
project specific requirements,
says CMT monitoring manager
Antonis Charalambides.
CMT chose Geodatas Kronos
data management software, a
package which collects and
presents data from several
sources and subcontractors. Offthe-shelf solutions such as
Kronos, or Soldatas Geoscope
can be suited to large projects or
programmes with numerous data
sources to manage and compare.

18 TUNNELLING JOURNAL

Why are you monitoring?

Theres a question which seems to be
missing from some monitoring regimes:
why? Designers look at whats been used
previously, third parties are looking for as
much monitoring as possible on their
assets, contractors are looking for the
cheapest solution and specialist monitoring
contractors just want to make sure that
data keeps coming, to meet their
contractual obligations.
You can end up with monitoring
systems that are over-the-top, says Peter
Wright, regional practice manager (tunnels
Europe) at CH2M Hill who is working on
the monitoring strategy for HS2. Over-

MONITORING

Defining A Plug-And-Play System

ITAtech was set up in 2011 in a bid to keep the industry up-to-date with
advances in materials, practice and technology and encourage speedier
take-up of new products and systems. Unlike the International Tunnelling
and Underground Space Associations (ITAs) more academic committees, the
ITAtech Activity Groups (AGs) are made up of manufacturers, designers and
contractors with a remit to put guidance and standards together as swiftly
as possible in order to encourage adoption of newer technologies.
The Monitoring AG, headed up by Felix Amberg, president and owner of
Amberg Technologies, has already published one document Guidelines on
Monitoring Frequencies in Urban Tunnelling in 2014, which sets out how
often hydro-geotechnical and structural parameters should be measured.
Now a Monitoring Sub-AG, headed up by Klaus Rabensteiner CEO of
Geodata, is working to produce guidance on information and
communication systems. The guidance, Effective Data Management in
Tunnelling, will define what a plug and play system for all data on site
should look like.
The overarching aim of the guidance is to demonstrate the benefits that
a well thought-out communication and information system can bring to a

specification doesnt just mean that you

have more information to handle, it can
mean that monitoring is less effective than
it could have been had a more modest and
appropriate solution been chosen.
Its about asking the right questions,
says Wright. Is it safety critical? What
activity are you carrying out? If you are
demolishing a building over a tunnel for
instance, manual monitoring of the tunnel
or infrequent automatic monitoring is
sufficient. If a TBM is passing under an
existing asset, you may need real time
monitoring.
Some clients take a blanket approach
and say everything needs monitoring,
says Stewart Harrison, chief surveyor for
Bam Ferrovial Kier (BFK) on the C300/C410
Western tunnels and stations contracts for
Crossrail. Specifications can be vague, he
says, simply stating that a structure should
be monitored and some contractors dont
have an understanding of what particular
movement or mechanism monitoring
should be watching for.
Third-party asset owners can also demand
unnecessarily large quantities of monitoring
data. You need to talk to third party asset
owners up front and get economic and
efficient monitoring agreed if you want to
avoid systems that are over-specified, says
Wright. The key is to actually get
monitoring experts in place at the design
stage. Thats what I am proposing for HS2.
We need people who can write guidelines
for monitoring equipment up front.
One knock-on effect from huge amounts
of data is problems with the quality of the
data produced. False alarms are a common
problem. With these flows of data
approaching all the time, you do get bad
results which mean that there are
disturbances to the systems so that errors

project in terms of safety, risk management and cost. It will tackle issues
such as how to write good specifications, how to choose between available
systems and make recommendations on exchange standards for data.
The paper aims to communicate what data management systems can do
through a series of case studies. We want to share experiences from a lot
of different projects, and from various viewpoints, explains Rabensteiner.
We have produced the paper in draft but it does not fully achieve this aim
in an appropriate way yet.
Ideally, Rabensteiner would like case studies to illustrate success stories
and lessons learned, although finding people who are willing to reveal all
about their projects is tricky. Another challenge for Rabensteiner is finding
companies and individuals who are willing to invest time in developing the
guidelines.
The following firms are involved in the sub-AG: ITMsoil, Soldata,
Geodata, Amberg Technologies, Babendererde Engineers, Astrium Services,
Herrenknecht, VMT and Seli. ITAtech would welcome other companies,
particularly consultants, to join the group. Those interested should contact
secretariat-itatech@ita-aites.org

can happen, says Klaus Rabensteiner, CEO

of Geodata.
If the values are not verified, we have a
lot of false alerts so we need algorithms to
check the validity of the data, to sort out
the false alarms, says Rabensteiner. The
way various packages do this varies widely
from provider to provider, he adds.
Stewart thinks that problems with false
alarms are due to a much more
fundamental issue. Rather than algorithms
to remove rogue results, monitoring systems
should be properly designed so that the
rogue results dont occur. The way
monitoring contracts are procured does not
necessarily encourage this approach:
Subcontractors are concerned with
delivering data, because that is how their
contracts measure them, he says. There
doesnt seem to be anything in any contract
that says the data has to be any good.
An industry-led group in the International
Tunnelling and Underground Space
Association (ITA) is currently working to set
minimum standards on what information
and monitoring management systems
should look like for various project types.
Led by Rabensteiner, the group is
developing guidelines on what it calls plug
and play data management systems (see
box).
Contractors are confronted with an
overload of data, says Rabensteiner. They
need that data to be easy to handle and
they need a clear concept of what to do
with all the data, how to collect it from
different sources, how to combine and
connect the data in order to extract the real
information.
The guidance should help designers
define monitoring regimes, says
Rabensteiner: Monitoring is part of the
feedback process. It has to be seen in a

bigger context. Monitoring gives feedback

to the design and allows adjustments for
the next steps.
Kronos in Copenhagen
Though European metro specifications have
been requiring monitoring databases for
over ten years, the Cityringen project called
for something Charalambides has not seen
before: multiple subcontractors feeding
information into the one database.
We had never worked this way before,
he says. On other projects, there was one
partner sending TBM data and the
monitoring department collecting its own
data; only two sources. On this project we
have a large number of subcontractors and
sources which are uploading different types
of data and information.
In addition to monitoring and TBM data,
the database receives data from the
groundwater management department, the
environmental department additional water
level measurements from two external
sources, construction progress from sites,
borehole profiles from two drilling
companies and evaluation data from the
geotechnical designer.
This is a trend which Charalambides
believes is set to continue. Cityringen has
brought some useful lessons for CMT and
specialist monitoring subcontractor SMT.
It did raise an issue of quality of
measurements, who checks, who corrects,
who has responsibility? says
Charalambides. In the future we will put
more weight on the description of the
quality requirements for uploading data,
cleaning, correcting measurements, and
define a clear grid of responsibilities.
Though false alarms are commonplace
where large amounts of automated data are
involved, the frequency was a problem for

TUNNELLING JOURNAL 19

MONITORING
Figures 2 and 3:
The upgrade of
London Bridge
Station involves
demolishing
masonry arches
which are currently
supporting the
tracks to make way
for a huge new
concourse. Arches
either side are
being retained by
buttresses and
monitored closely
during the works.

Cityringen initially. It happened too often at

first which is why we added a first level
function which filtered out measurements
which we are sure to be incorrect. This does
allow for a number of measurements every
day which are false and these are captured
on a second level, where they are manually
confirmed or deactivated.
The first-level data handling process,
developed by CMT and SMT, sees automatic
checking using algorithms to recognise and
filter out the majority of incorrect
measurements, followed by manual
verification of measurements by SMT, and
finally interpretation of the measurements by
CMT.
The automatic checking was something
we recognised as very essential to the

operation of the system, says

Charalambides. It was not described in the
technical specifications but you either need
lots of people continuously looking at
computers and finding out where the wrong
measurements are or you need the system
itself to be able to recognise where
measurements are certainly wrong and clean
itself.
One of the challenges we had in
developing it was how to regulate it to
remove most of the incorrect measurements,
while reducing the risk of removing
measurements that could be correct and
would generate real alarms.
The client was kept informed about the
systems architecture and how the cleaning
algorithms would work. We developed it

with common knowledge and acceptance of

all the implicated parties, says
Charalambides. One of the fundamental
things is that we dont delete anything. Users
can select to see the cleaned or all the
measurements.
Kronos alarming system has provided
CMT with early warnings several times, says
Charalambides. On at least three occasions
we were able to mitigate risks when we
found out that loads on struts were
developing faster than expected, he says.
In one case we moved the position of a
mobile crane, in the second we moved a
stockpile of excavated materials and in the
third instance we placed an additional strut
in order to maintain the excavation safe.
After those remedial actions, excavation

TUNNELLING JOURNAL 21

MONITORING
could continue. The early warnings allow us
to mitigate problems before they become
significant.
Charalambides makes the point that all
data management systems must be bespoke
to some degree. I dont think a plug-andplay system that covers everything exists, he
says. There are always local requirements
and needs. You need a good basic system
that can be easily adapted.
For example Denmark also has its own
format for recording and exchanging
geotechnical information, GeoGIS. Kronos
was set up to be compatible to AGS, a
widely used format for recording and
exchanging geotechnical information. So an
interface to make Kronos compatible with
data in the GeoGIS format was required to

concourse, the arches and tracks above them

must be demolished and a new structure and
tracks constructed. This is happening in nine
phases to minimise disruption to the station.
Having won monitoring contracts for the
gigantic glass Shard building right next to
London Bridge station, and on the Shards
baby brother The Place, Soldata completed a
hat trick of wins when Costain appointed it
to work on the station redevelopment in
2011. It is using its Geoscope 7 software,
launched commercially last year after five
years of development, to marshal and
compare multiple sources of data.
Geoscope 7 is also being used on
Tottenham Court Road underground station
redevelopment in London, on the Alaskan
Way viaduct in Seattle, and on metro projects

This method stabilises the results,

reducing system noise and is
calibrated specifically to follow the
expected slow trending
movements during and after the
period of excavation,
be included.
Monitoring regimes will also vary between
regions. On Cityringen the specifications
suggested moderate-to-high frequency
manual measurement in stations and some
parts of the tunnels, but this would not have
been cost-effective. Says Charalambides:
When we started planning how the
entire monitoring system would be set up,
we realised that we would need an extensive
team to perform, verify and upload the
required measurements. In Northern Europe
this is not really an option the cost of
personnel does not allow it. The only costeffective way was to introduce automation.
In other parts of the world, manual
measurements could be a better solution.
Geoscope 7 at London Bridge
The overground station at London Bridge is
currently undergoing a circa 750M
upgrade, courtesy of Costain, which will
increase the number of trains it can
accommodate from a maximum of 70 to 88
an hour. At the heart of the project is a
massive new concourse which will allow
access via escalators and lifts up to all the
stations 15 platforms. At the moment, the
platforms are in two groups, each with its
own access.
London Bridges tracks are built on top of
150-year old masonry arches. In order to
create the new underground space for the

22 TUNNELLING JOURNAL

in Rennes, France, Riyadh, and Doha.

Unlike its predecessors, Geoscope 7 can
handle much more than monitoring data,
says Soldata marketing manager Aidan
Laimbeer. Its a risk management tool which
enables you to integrate any database in a
timely manner and present the data in a way
thats open, accessible and understandable.
The amount of databases you can have is
phenomenal.
Information related to compensation
grouting, TBM progress and weather
conditions, as well as monitoring data could
all be presented. In some cases we are
using it as an observational method tool,
says Soldata technical manager Matthieu
Bourdon. We can link into the preexcavation grouting contractors databases
and compare pressure and volume with
ground movement.
The user interface is more graphical and
more intuitive than the previous version and
it works with tablets, says Alex Lawson,
duty operation engineer for Costain at
London Bridge. You can have any
combination of data you want very easily. So
for example, you can overlay track settlement
with arch settlement to see if they are
related.
Since the contract began, Costain has
chosen to direct more and more information
through Geoscope 7. If somebodys data is
good, but we dont like their interface, we

put it on this, says Lawson.

The instrumentation at London Bridge
includes over 30 automatic total stations
(ATSs), electrolevels underneath the masonry
arches, tilt meters on London Underground
escalators, inclinometers inside piles for
retaining walls, strain gauges and
piezometers. There was also vibration
monitoring earlier in the programme.
The project is very dynamic, says Soldata
project manager Nathalia Arevalo. Because
they are demolishing two tracks at a time,
we have to get in there and install the
instruments before the next phase of the
works starts.
In addition to Soldata and Costain,
geotechical engineers, surveyors, specialist
contractors, London Underground and
Network Rail can all see the information
relevant to them through Geoscope 7. Each
has their own user rights for accessing the
database.
With a project as complex as London
Bridge, there have been several instances
where ground and building movements have
required further investigation, such as when
piling for a buttress wall to support
remaining arches is underway. At these
times, the ability to quickly compare and
overlay different information is invaluable,
says Lawson.
One of the really useful features of
Geoscope 7 is the layer management: you
can compare ten different sources of data,
and if you see something that you want to
alert other people to, you can save that view
and send it to the relevant people, says
Lawson. Overall, its so much more efficient
which means you have more time to spend
on other tasks.
Tight and bespoke at Paddington
For the excavation of the TBM tunnels under
Paddington Station box for Crossrail, BFK
elected to use an in-house designed
monitoring system. We didnt want to do
monitoring just for monitorings sake, says
Harrison. The system was scientifically
designed to meet our needs as the
contractor.
One of the factors behind BFKs decision to
design its own monitoring system was that it
had experienced data quality issues with
monitoring subcontractors. Harrison feels
strongly that algorithms to remove rogue data
are not whats needed here; a properly
designed system should avoid erroneous
readings, and use advanced survey concepts
to take out the noise or undulations in
measurements.
The challenge at Paddington was that
programme constraints meant that
Costain/Skanska JV had to construct the 24mdeep station box as the tunnels beneath
eventually to be broken out were still serving
the TBMs. Movements in the tunnels had to
be predicted before the contractor could

MONITORING
decide to take this approach, and the
monitoring system had to check the actual
movements to ensure the stability of the
tunnels and the safety of the operation.
The in-tunnel monitoring system was
modelled virtually and checked using Star*net

software, which carries out least-squares

adjustments of survey networks. Least squares
adjustment is a mathematical procedure
which looks at multiple measurements in a
network and finds the best-fit solution and its
something Harrison has been applying since

Figure 4: Sample Daily Report Sheet from Paddington (Movement Time Plots
vs Construction Activity)

Figure 5: Predicted vs Actual Tunnel Movement at Paddington

2007. The monitoring network consisted of

three automated total stations in each tunnel,
with prisms every five to six rings at seven
positions round each ring. The virtual model
allowed BFK to check lines of site and
instrument positions among the ventilation
bagging, tracks, walkway and
other services to minimise the
amount adjustment required once
the kit was installed on site.
Harrison describes the system as
an organic network. By this he
means that the network fixes
points outside the zone of
influence of the works and
partially fixes points within the
zone of influence to the last
known value, allowing those
points to be used as a control.
This method stabilises the
results, reducing system noise and
is calibrated specifically to follow
the expected slow trending
movements during and after the
period of excavation, says
Harrison.
The results obtained from
monitoring during the excavation
correlated closely with those
predicted during the design phase.
And no filtering or smoothing of
the data was required, says
Harrison.
This was an efficient solution for
the excavation of the Paddington
Station box, made possible by the
fact it has in-house expertise.
However, contractors may not
have the resource to build bespoke
systems, especially where large
projects and programmes require
multiple data sources to be
managed at once.
Formula 1 comes to Farringdon
Arup and Atkins are employing a
technique honed in Formula 1 to
help their engineers make sense of
monitoring information. The
consultants have been working
with analytics specialist Quantum
Black to develop something they
call Adaptive Instrumentation and
Monitoring (AIM).
Having carried out a pilot study,
Arup proposed the use of AIM on
Crossrails Farringdon and
Whitechapel Stations. Other metro
developers including MTR in Hong
Kong and LTA in Singapore are
also reported to be interested in
what AIM can do.
With many monitoring
contractors software packages,
the graphical interpretation is clear
but they dont introduce
construction progress and trying to

24 TUNNELLING JOURNAL

MONITORING
Figure 6: Adaptive Instrumentation and Monitoring (AIM) application

correlate it with the monitoring data is

difficult, says Arup associate director Mike
Devriendt. Contractors were presenting
monitoring information to us in a rather
disorganised way, and construction data was
not being represented alongside it. It was
taking our engineers as much time piecing
together what construction event had caused
the movement as the time spent reviewing
the data and interpreting.
AIM presents ground and structural
monitoring results in a clear graphical way
together with construction progress. But the
clever bit is the analytics: looking for patterns
of data which can give early warnings or help
optimise monitoring systems.
If you have racing cars going round a
Formula 1 circuit, you are trying to look at
data channels and spot problems with the
engine or the tyre pressure, looking for trends
in the data, says Devriendt. Similarly with
reviewing tunnelling-induced ground
movements, you need to spot trends which
are concerning and discern them from
anomalies in the data.
The analytics in AIM can do three things:
spot anomalies in the data and distinguish
between errors and concerning trends;
continuously update mathematical models to
forecast an end result; and look at the
interdependence of points with respect to
space and time, and suggest where there may
be redundancy in the system.
It has the potential to make monitoring
instrumentation design more efficient, says
Devriendt.
For contractors, this could lead to more
cost-effective procurement of monitoring
services. For clients tendering monitoring

works, rather than opting for a lump sum

contract it may make sense to go
remeasureable, says Devriendt. Install a
robust amount of instrumentation then dial
up or down the frequency of measurement.
Setting the frequency would require
engineering judgement, considering what
construction activity was next and what
redundancy the analytics had identified.
This could be one way to make savings,
although such an approach needs to be
agreed with third-party asset owners, says
Devriendt. However, in speaking with many
asset owners in recent years, there is a
willingness to review these novel approaches
if they offer greater visibility of data
Interpreting monitoring and construction
progress data is just one of numerous
potential applications for analytics in civil
engineering. Others include processing data
gathered from the measurement trains which
survey railways or baggage handling systems.
No more middle man?
What all these solutions have in common is
the ability to connect client, engineer and
contractor to the data more directly and more
effectively. The end result should be a more
dynamic use of monitoring data to help
inform immediate and future decisions about
design and sequencing.
Both BFKs in-house approach and Arup
Atkins QuantumBlacks analytics solution
demonstrate contractors and designers
attempting to take more ownership of how
their monitoring data is served up. Our
software has been designed by engineers
interpreting the data rather than monitoring
contractors, who are contracted to provide

the data, says Devriendt.

The need to give the user more control is
something Soldata acknowledges too.
Bourdon expects that some organisations will
choose to buy Geoscope 7 without also
procuring Soldatas services.
Its the first time that software gives the
keys to the client, says Bourdon. Its a new
strategy. Until now, monitoring companies
wanted to control the data. It was compulsory
to use a specialist contractor to manage the
data. Now you can employ people internally,
remanage the costs.
Mehdi Alhaddad, a PhD student at the
Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure,
reminds us of another strong force for change
in this area: generational differences.
Updating our current 'data interaction' tools
is a crucial task that our industry must take
very seriously, especially if we want to appeal
to the new generation of civil engineers who
are often disappointed when they come
across our current tools, says Alhaddad. For
him, tools such as AIM present data in a
form that is closer to what a modern brain is
trained to digest.
Those from Alhaddads Millennial
generation, aged between 20 and 34, have
grown up with mobile, smart technology and
unlike some of their older counterparts
may not be able to work with columns of
data listed in a spreadsheet. Of course, these
generational differences do not apply to every
individual but they do point to trends.
It will be interesting to see what sort of
tools the brains of Generation Z, those aged
20 and younger, will work best with. Expect
some exciting new developments in the nottoo-distant future.

TUNNELLING JOURNAL 25

MONITORING
OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS Asia has
been home to some of the worlds largest and
most complex tunnelling projects. Many of
these have been delivered within challenging
ground conditions and ultra-competitive
markets. Whilst there have been commercial
and technical failures which have dominated
the press there have also been many notable
successes. The regions response to the
requirements of the Joint Code of Practice
2004 has been laudable and in all Asian
countries formal risk management procedures
have been driven through by clients and
consultants and embraced by contractors.
Our ability to measure what we do is greater
now than ever before and as a result there has
been an explosion in the amount of
information which needs assimilating and
communicating. This has raised a number of
challenges. The need to process and review all
this information puts a large strain on
manpower resources and as a result Engineers
and geologists have become slaves to word
processors and spreadsheets. More time is
often spent handling information rather than
analysing it. Typically engineers are resourceful
and many develop their own systems to
manage this workload but this plethora of
personal systems limits the extent to which
data can be communicated and collaborated.
Often projects and their data are
compartmentalised and run by different teams
each with differing focus and agenda. How
often have we been told talk to Production
or talk to Geotech in response to a request
for information? The goal must be to enable
Production to answer a geotech question
because they are themselves informed on
geotechnical issues.
Maxwell Geosystems have been at the
forefront of a quiet revolution in Asia which
started in Hong Kong in 1997 with the
Strategic Sewage Disposal Scheme. This was
the first project to implement a project wide
information system to collect as much
structured data as possible about all aspects of
the construction process. The initiative was
born out of client and engineer frustration at
the inconsistency in reporting across contract
teams on the same large project. The widely
publicised contractual difficulties focussed
attention on data and how it would be
managed given that future arbitration was
inevitable. This buy in by the project top brass
gave the initiative impetus and by 1998 the
system was managing all data on the three
replacement contracts and producing
standardised reports to government. This was
not without some difficulty. In 1997 the
internet was not so reliable and the system
had to rely on daily merging of multiple sites
data into the central system. Whilst clunky this
was effective and by the end of the project
every 15 minutes of time, every hole drilled,
support installed and geology logged had
been loaded into one system which

Dr Angus Maxwell and Dr Andrew Ridley of the

GEOMAX Partnership describe how automated
risk management has been achieved using
integrated systems on some of Asias largest
tunnel infrastructure projects.

MISSION
POSSIBLE
Figure 1: An early TDMS implementation on Hong Kong West Drainage Tunnel

comfortably sat on one CD. Accompanied by a

database of over twenty thousand fully
indexed photographs readily accessible in
paper and digital form the system was a key
component in the clients successful arbitration
case.
Overcoming inertia
Systems such as these always fight against
inertia to be established. We are told that data
is power and it is true that individuals see
ownership of data as important and a way of
achieving competitive advantage. We all strive
to have better data than the next guy.
However, once in place all but the most
stubborn become advocates particularly if they
can get to their information and the
information of others quickly and easily and
safe in the knowledge that it has been audited
for quality and correctness.

The usefulness of the systems become most

apparent during the planning for the highly
sensitive stage 2 around Hong Kong Island.
The detailed data on production, in particular
the effect on poor ground and water inflow
combined with statistics for drilling and
grouting and the observed sensitivity of
overlying deposits were instrumental in the
delivery of the project through feasibility to
detailed design and construction. With greater
certainty on required quantities and risks the
engineer was able to go to tender with a far
more equitable contract and a much lower risk
solution involving drill and blast. The tunnels
were completed in 2014 with no repeat of the
contractual or settlement issues which plagued
phase 1.
Formalised data
The benefits of formalised data management

TUNNELLING JOURNAL 27

MONITORING
Figure 2: West Kowloon Station linking progress monitoring design and
construction data

have been embraced by the Geotechnical

Engineering Office and the requirements for
Tunnel Data Management Systems have now
been promulgated gradually through all
government departments. Initially the systems
were driven through conventional Engineers
design contracts using standard ICE terms.
They were placed under the consultants
contract with the intention they be delivered
by the resident site staff and populated by the
inspectors and engineers. Later this was
passed down to the main contractors
contract. This led to some difficulty gaining
buy in since the systems were initially seen as a
noose by which the Contractor could hang
themselves. As a result only the minimum
contractually obligated data was entered and
strictly to satisfy the contract rather than as an
integral part of the contractors daily methods.
Over the past eight years of implementation
contractors have come to realise that these
systems can be used to their benefit whilst also
satisfying the contractors requirements. The
systems recently installed on the Klang Valley
Metro in Kuala Lumpur have replaced manual
methods of producing AAA response reports
with live reports generated on demand from a
secure blogging facility. Each alarm starts a
thread and the organised responses to the
thread follow the agreed procedure. The
contractor saves time, the communication and
reaction time is quicker, engineers spend more
time on the solutions than on the reports and
we dont cut down trees.
Since the much publicised Nicol Highway
failure in 2004 the Land Transport Authority in
Singapore have removed all responsibility for
protective instrumentation and monitoring
from the main contractor and put it under the
government body. Whilst this ensured
impartiality, the MTRC in Hong Kong adopted

28 TUNNELLING JOURNAL

hats off approach. Early systems were

delivered with engagement from designers to
enable them to get feedback on their designs
in real time. The designers designed what they
wanted the systems to do and the system
consultant made it happen. On the rapidly
changing sites the system became the focus
for the daily permit to tunnel risk assessments.
Such collaborative risk management was
the key motivator behind Singapore Powers
decision to implement their IDMS system in
2013. With two projects and 16 simultaneous
TBM drives under very sensitive infrastructure
this is one of the largest tunnelling projects in
the world. Previous cable tunnel projects
which had encountered significant settlements
during the construction stage triggered the
need for comprehensive instrumentation data
management systems. It was hoped this
would allow all parties (client, consultants &
contractors) to access the basis of design data,

Figure 3: Keeping it simple.

Singapore Power Cable Tunnels
16 consecutive TBM drives
monitored in one platform

a different approach driven by the desire to

leave monitoring with the party best able to
interpret and respond to it. The MTRC put in
place a party whose responsibility it was to
verify the data by independent measurement
and to publish the data to all parties so that all
information could be seen. This was the
Independent Monitoring Consultant.
The Regional Express Line (XRL) monitored
over 30000 instruments along its 25km length
and the IMC check measured approximately
15% of the contractors values and loaded all
data IMC and main contractor into a centralise
database. The physical checks were particularly
effective in raising the confidence in the data
quality and delivering information quickly to
the contractor but were only truly effective in a
design sense when parties were encouraged
to regularly provide ground
investigation, design prediction and
Figure 4: No CAD bottleneck. Deep shafts and
construction progress data so that
tunnel connections are best explained with
cause, effect and expectation could
real time BIM programmatic constructions
be monitored. This was particularly
apparent for the 400m x 250m x
30m deep station excavation in
West Kowloon. Whilst successful,
the motivation for contractors to
engage was uncertain still seeing
this as a clients risk reduction tool
and an effective one at that with the
IMC contract being a contributory
factor to a reduction in negotiated
project insurance.
While all this was unfolding
Australia were promoting the use of
Alliance forms of contracting on
Projects such as the Inner Northern
Busway, Gateway Motorway and
Airport Link in Brisbane and the
Ballina Bypass in New South Wales
and the systems blossomed in this

MONITORING
real-time and manual monitoring data as well
as the construction activities carried out at site
through a common platform that provide
interactive functions to generate graphical
plots linking the monitoring data and the
construction activities. Based on the cause and
effect information, the system will allow the
project team to predict, forecast and use the
system as the risk management tool for lookahead construction activities.
In common with Singapore government
projects the instrumentation contracts were
directly let under the owner and supervised by
the QPS. Centralised collection of these results
and site observations from the QPS teams
would be straight forward but the collection of
tunnelling information would need the
cooperation of the contractors.
The Client negotiated with all six contractors
on the project to request them to contribute to
a centralised system for the management of
risk as part of the partnering process. The cost
of the system was equally shared by all seven
parties including client and contractors. Whilst
still seen by the contractors as an owners
initiative, the requirement to have a financial
stake motivated contractors to use the system
for their benefit.
The system scope and delivery was managed
by a steering committee with representatives
from all the financial contributors. In addition
to providing the system the IDMS consultant
also provided staff to maintain the data and
provide a line of communication for users. The
team was managed by an experienced
instrumentation and geotechnical engineer.
The critical key to success was the presence of
director level drivers within all the teams who
demanded the use of the system across the
projects and weaned the staff away from their
spreadsheet and word zones of comfort into a
new way of operating using open booked data
and effective media sharing and
communication methods.
The systems now enable all the engineers to
access any data and draw any map, section
graph or table for instruments TBM or
production parameters ground investigation
and other digitised data sources such as
hazards. The system embeds contractors
design predictions as they change through a
project enabling all parties to establish the
expectations of the works and identify early
areas of concern and trends. All of these
analyses can be designed into custom canvases
where each user can tell their own story.

Figure 5 a to c. Engineers need the ability to undertake the kind of analysis

normally reserved for forensic investigations of failure.before the failure.

Allowing engineering
Systems will never replace engineers but they
will increase the proportion of time engineers
spend doing engineering. They also enable
relationships to be observed which would
otherwise be missed and this is the real
benefit. Above all engineers can now do in
real time the type of analysis that was normally
reserved for several weeks of forensic
investigation after a problem had occurred.

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