Analysis of artificial intelligence approaches to predict the wall deflection induced by deep excavation

Abstract

The geological condition of Ho Chi Minh (HCM) City is soft soil and high groundwater and includes two main structural layers such as Pleistocene and Holocene sediments. Therefore, deep excavation of all the high-rise buildings in the city is usually supported by concrete retaining walls such as the diaphragm or bored pile retaining walls. The system limits the excavation wall deflection during the construction process which could pose a potential risk to the construction and neighborhood areas. To estimate wall deformation at a highly accurate and efficient level, this study presents several machine learning models including feed-forward neural network back-propagation (FFNN-BP), long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM), and support vector regression (SVR). The database for the experiment was obtained from a high building in HCM City, Vietnam. The database is deployed to implement the proposed algorithms in walk-forward validation technique. As a result, the Bi-LSTM model reduced prediction errors and improved robustness than the LSTM, FFNN-BP, and SVR models. Bi-LSTM, LSTM, and FFNN-PB could be used for predicting deep excavation wall deflection. In the meantime, not only could the estimated results support safety monitoring and early warning during the construction stages but also could contribute to legal guidelines for the architecture of deep excavations in the city's soft ground.