The HKIE Geotechnical Division 42nd Annual Seminar, 2022

Digital Solutions to Improve Workflows of 3D Ground

Modelling

K. K. Wu, J. Chin, C. Ng, & R. Tsui

Aurecon Hong Kong Limited

ABSTRACT
The process to create a representative 3D ground model often starts with importing digitised ground
investigation (GI) data into 3D software. This first step is very vital without which a meaningful result
will not be available for further ground interpretation. Since the invention of digitised GI data in the
1990s, any digitised GI data obtained on site can be electronically transferred to any readily available
3D software by adopting the AGS file format (*.AGS) invented by the Association of Geotechnical and
Geoenvironmental Specialists.
To utilise any digital GI data for this purpose, an engineering geologist often must go through the
painstaking process to manually clean up, validate and often change the data structure to suit the
import format of 3D software. Otherwise, and due to specific group hierarchy structure of AGS data
format, details will be lost or wrong representation is shown such that risks and uncertainties could
potentially be overlooked in the interpretation of the data.
Aurecon has developed several programming scripts specifically to replace and automate the manual
process to restructure any AGS data, hence streamlined the process of 3D ground modelling. After
any AGS files are run through by these scripts, the likelihood of overlooking any details or missing any
important information has been greatly minimized. From our experience, the time saving between
using these scripts and manually processing digital data to build up a 3D ground model is often more
than 50%.
This paper will first discuss the challenges of building a 3D ground modelling from AGS data, followed
by discussion on the preferred data structure for ground modelling and finally discuss the function and
capability of these scripts to overcome these challenges.