Computationally Efficient Simulation in Urban Mechanized Tunneling Based on Multilevel BIM Models

The design of complex underground infrastructure projects involves various empirical, analytical, or numerical models with different levels of complexity. The use of simulation models in the current state-of-the-art tunnel design process can be cumbersome when significant manual time-consuming preparation, analysis, and excessive computing resources are required. This paper addresses the challenges connected with minimizing the user workload and computational time, as well as enabling real-time computations during construction. To ensure a seamless workflow during design and to minimize the computation time of the analysis, we propose a novel concept for Building Information Modeling (BIM)-based numerical simulations enabling the modeling of the tunnel advance with different levels of detail in terms of geometrical representation, material modeling, and modeling of the advancement process. To ensure computational efficiency, simulation software was developed with special emphasis on efficient implementation, including parallelization strategies for shared and distributed memory systems. For real-time on-demand calculations, simulation-based metamodels were integrated into the software platform. The components of the BIM-based multilevel simulation concept were described and evaluated in detail by means of representative numerical examples.