Decision Aids for Tunneling A CATALOGUE FOR APPLICATION TO SMALL TUNNELS

The Decision Aids for Tunneling are a very powerful tool in assisting decision makers. They have been developed and applied over decades. As popular as they have become in big tunneling projects, they remain complicated and less used for small tunnels. The objective of this work is to devise a way to facilitate their use for small tunneling applications. After considering two different approaches, a “calculator” and a “catalogue”, the latter was developed. A Catalogue is arguably the best option to do so, as a compromise between both extremes of completely modeling each project and just not using the DAT. The users only have to consult the proper pre-developed chart in order to obtain the total construction time and cost for their project without using the DAT or running any simulations themselves. The Catalogue currently consists of 27 charts. Each one presenting results based on 50,000 simulations for each one of five length steps: 1 to 5