Foundation settlement prediction based on a novel NGM model

Abstract

Prediction of foundation or subgrade settlement is very important during engineering construction. According to the fact that there are lots of settlement-time sequences with a nonhomogeneous index trend, a novel grey forecasting model called NGM (1,1, k, c) model is proposed in this paper. With an optimized whitenization differential equation, the proposed NGM (1,1, k, c) model has the property of white exponential law coincidence and can predict a pure nonhomogeneous index sequence precisely. We used two case studies to verify the predictive effect of NGM (1,1, k, c) model for settlement prediction. The results show that this model can achieve excellent prediction accuracy; thus, the model is quite suitable for simulation and prediction of approximate nonhomogeneous index sequence and has excellent application value in settlement prediction. © 2014 Peng-Yu Chen and Hong-Ming Yu.