Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507

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Computers and Geotechnics

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Research Paper

Influence of a weak layer on the tunnel face stability – Reliability and T

sensitivity analysis
⁎ ⁎⁎
Siyang Zhoua,b, Xiangfeng Guob, , Qian Zhanga, , Daniel Diasb,c, Qiujing Pand
a
Key Laboratory of Modern Engineering Mechanics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China
b
Laboratory 3SR, CNRS UMR 5521, Grenoble Alpes University, Grenoble 38000, France
c
Antea Group, Antony 92160, France
d
School of Civil Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410075, China

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: In this study, reliability and sensitivity analyses were employed to investigate the effects of a weak interlayer on
Tunnel face stability tunnel face stability. Due to the irregular geology process and the movement of tunnelling machine, the situa-
Weak interlayer tions of weak soils encountered during tunnel construction are complex and variable. To address this problem,
Reliability analysis this paper adopted reliability and sensitivity analysis to evaluate the face stability of a tunnel considering a weak
Sensitivity analysis
soil layer. An active learning method which combines Kriging and Monte Carlo Simulation (AK-MCS) was used
Kriging
for the reliability analysis. Then, the importance of each stochastic soil property was estimated by coupling the
surrogate model constructed in the AK-MCS with the global sensitivity analysis (GSA). Compared with tradi-
tional approaches, the employed technique (termed as AK-MCS-GSA) is able to provide a variety of interesting
results (failure probability, model response statistics and sensitivity index) but with a greatly reduced compu-
tational time. The obtained results permitted to show that a weak soil layer over the tunnel cross-section can lead
to a significant increase of failure probability. Additionally, the sensitivity indices in GSA revealed that the soil's
frictional angle of the weak layer has the greatest influence on the face stability. Moreover, the impacts of
varying the weak layer’s position and thickness are discussed. The critical position for the weak layer which
leads to the biggest failure probability is remarked.

1. Introduction
To prevent failures in geotechnical engineering, there has been an
increasing demand of probabilistically evaluating the risk of en-
gineering projects by considering the complexity of the ground and the
uncertainties related to soil properties. High failure probabilities can
result in many casualties and economic damage, while lower values
result in overly expensive systems. Especially, for the accidents occur-
ring during a tunnel construction as shown in Fig. 1, it would require
expensive cost for pavement and building rehabilitation, and pose a
threat to life. Therefore, it is important to take into account the un-
certainties of soil properties which are unavoidable for tunnel face
stability analysis.
Using a reliability evaluation provides a means of assessing the
degree of the model response uncertainty for the tunnel design. To
rationally deal with the uncertainties in geotechnical engineering
analysis, many studies of reliability analysis [1,2] have been performed
in recent years for the tunnel face stability. Mollon et al. [3–5] proposed
a 3D rotational failure mechanism model for homogeneous soils and
carried out a probabilistic analysis using respectively the collocation-
based stochastic response surface method and the first-order reliability
method (FORM). The 3D rotational mechanism model was then ex-
tended to study the effect of anisotropic and nonhomogeneous soils on
the tunnel face stability by Pan and Dias [6]. Pan et al. [7] conducted a
probabilistic stability analysis for rock tunnels using the Polynomial
Chaos Expansion. The failure probabilities were discussed in terms of
different coefficients of variation, distribution types and correlation
coefficients. By using the sparse polynomial chaos expansion (SPCE),
Pan and Dias [8] discussed the tunnel face stability in spatially random
soils [9], as well as the influence of the cross-correlation between the
cohesion and frictional angle on the probability density function of the
required face pressure. In addition, Zeng et al. [10] conducted a relia-
bility analysis for rock tunnels through the FORM, the response surface
method (RSM) and the Importance Sampling (IS), with the

⁎
Corresponding author.
⁎⁎
Co-corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: xiangfeng.guo@3sr-grenoble.fr (X. Guo), zhangqian@tju.edu.cn (Q. Zhang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compgeo.2020.103507
Received 24 October 2019; Received in revised form 18 February 2020; Accepted 20 February 2020
Available online 28 February 2020
0266-352X/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
S. Zhou, et al.
Fig. 1. Accident due to face instability in mechanized tunnelling.
consideration of different distribution types and correlation structures.
For two-layered tunnels, random fields were employed to describe the
spatial variability of soil strength parameters by Cheng et al. [11].
Reliability-based analysis of braced excavation in unsaturated soils was
performed by Gholampour and Johari [12]. With regard to homo-
geneous and layered soft ground, the effects of different soil strength
parameters, cover-to-diameter ratios and tunnel diameters on shield
tunnel face were investigated through numerical simulations by Alagha
and Chapman [13] in a deterministic framework.
In difficult geotechnical conditions, soils masses containing a weak
layer are widely encountered. The formation of weak interlayers is
caused by geological deposition or ground movement. The presence of a
weak interlayer can have a devastating impact on the performance of
geotechnical structures [14], whereas limited studies were conducted in
a probabilistic framework for the weak layer effect on tunnel face
safety. In other words, it is highly desirable to employ a probabilistic
analysis to study the influence of the low strength of a weak layer on
structure global behaviour. Such influence has been highlighted by
previous studies for pile-soil interaction [15] and seismic event [16]
from a deterministic point of view.
In terms of underground tunneling, the tunnel cross-section is in-
evitably passed through different soil formations. Thus, a variation of
the position and thickness of the weak interlayer is often observed.
However, few attempts have been made to consider the soil variabilities
on the tunnel face stability with the existence of a weak layer. The
stratification uncertainties related to the weak soil’s position and
thickness were also seldom investigated. To address these issues, the
current study performs reliability and sensitivity analyses on the tunnel
face stability considering a weak interlayer. The objective is to provide
an effective approach to investigate the uncertain events occurred in
tunnelling, and some insights into the importance of the concerned soil
properties.
Firstly, the kinematical approach of the limit analysis is adopted as
the deterministic model to calculate the critical pressure for ensuring
the tunnel face stability. Then, an active learning method (AK-MCS)
which combines the Kriging and the Monte Carlo Simulation is applied
to build a metamodel which is an approximation of the deterministic
model. After the construction of the metamodel, a MCS with respect to
the metamodel is performed, in order to estimate the failure probability
and the statistical moments of face pressure. Finally, the importance of
each stochastic soil property is evaluated by coupling the obtained
Kriging surrogate model with the global sensitivity analysis (GSA). The
objective is to detect significant input parameters and have an idea
about their influences on the performances of the whole system. In
addition, complementary probabilistic analyses are carried out to dis-
cuss the influence of the applied face pressure, the thickness and po-
sition of the weak interlayer on the reliability and sensitivity analysis
results. In order to validate the adopted deterministic model for the case
of a weak layer, the results of a reference case are compared with those
2
Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507
Fig. 2. The profile of the three-layered formations.
computed by a three dimensional numerical model.
2. Problem statement
As mentioned above, the presence of weak soil layers is one of the
unfavorable geological conditions commonly existing in underground
engineering. Many failures of underground openings were reported to
be closely related to the existence of weak interlayers nearby. Hence, it
is of great importance to investigate the effect of such weak interlayers
on the tunnel face stability. Three-layered formations will be discussed
in this paper by means of reliability and sensitivity analysis.
As illustrated in Fig. 2, a tunnel with a diameter (D) of 10 m and a
buried depth of 10 m in a multi-layered ground is studied. This tunnel
model has been studied in [17] but for the lining strength in a de-
terministic way. The middle layer is the weak layer. L is its thickness,
while T represents the vertical distance from the tunnel center to the
bottom of the weak layer.
Table 1 presents the statistical input parameters used in this study,
in which relevant soil properties (Cohesion c, Frictional angle φ, Unit
weight γ) for evaluating the tunnel stability are considered. The dis-
tribution type and the related parameters are in agreement with pre-
vious studies [8,16]. For the adopted distributions, both the Beta and
Log-normal are commonly used in literature [11,18,19] for geo-
technical problems. The Beta distribution has been advocated princi-
pally due to its flexibility and the upper-lower bounds of its domain,
matching the upper and lower bounds for geotechnical variables such
as the frictional angle [20]. For the other two parameters, the log-
normal distribution has often been suggested in lieu of the normal
distribution, since it excludes negative values and affords some con-
venience in mathematical derivations (e.g. two-parameter probability
distribution function (PDF) and easy transformation to Normal dis-
tribution) [21].
In Table 1, μ stands for the mean value and CoV represents the
coefficient of variation. The tunnel diameter D and the buried depth C
are set to be deterministic. Because a negative correlation [22] between
frictional angle and cohesion is widely reported in literature, an illus-
trative value of −0.5 is adopted in this paper as a correlation coeffi-
cient between these two parameters.
3. Methods
To explain the methods employed in this work more clearly, the
applied techniques are stated in this section with the following order:
Firstly, the deterministic model is presented, and its basic principles are
explained. Next, a Kriging based surrogate modelling technique is in-
troduced. Subsequently, a reliability simulation method (MCS) is de-
scribed. Then, an active learning method that combines the Kriging
theory and the MCS is established which permits an efficient and ac-
curate estimate of failure probability. Finally, the global sensitivity
analysis is presented for estimating the importance of each soil property
with the constructed metamodel.
S. Zhou, et al. Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507

Table 1
Input probabilistic parameters for characterizing the uncertainties in soil properties.
Frictional angle (°) Cohesion (kPa) Unit weight (kN/m3)
Distribution Beta (Min-Max: 0–45) Log-normal Log-normal

Top layer μ = 20 CoV = 10% μ=8 CoV = 20% μ = 19 CoV = 5%

Middle layer (Weak layer) μ = 15 μ=5 μ = 19
Bottom layer μ = 20 μ=8 μ = 19

Fig. 3. 3D rotational collapse mechanism of the tunnel face.

3.1. Deterministic model of tunnel face stability Fig. 4. Computation of the rates of work for tunnel face pressure.

When a tunnelling machine is advancing through the soil mass,

insufficient support pressure may lead to soil movements, thus the
tunnel face stability is highly concerned. In this study, a 3D rotational
failure mechanism is adopted to estimate the critical support pressure
which is required for ensuring the face stability of tunnels. The main
principle for the mechanism is presented in this section. As shown in
Fig. 3, a rotational rigid-block mechanism is considered. It was firstly
proposed by Mollon et al. [5] in the context of kinematical approach of
limit analysis. They also compared the proposed model (termed as KA
model) with a 3D numerical model for different cases and found that
the KA model could give relatively accurate estimate for the critical
collapse pressure of the tunnel face.
The critical pressure is calculated based on the upper bound limit
theory, in which the work equations are established and the critical
pressure is solved as the total rate of external work is equal to the total
rate of internal energy dissipation.
For the calculation of work equation, the rate of work of the collapse
pressure is given by Eq. (1):

Wσ̇ c = ∬Σ →σc·→vj dΣ = ∑ (→σc·→vj ·Σj) = - ω·σc· ∑ (Σj ·Rj ·cos βj )

j j (1)

Wσ̇ c represents the rate of work of the collapse pressure, σc is the

collapse face pressure, ω is the uniform angular velocity around a
Fig. 5. Computation of the rates of work for the soil weight of moving block.
horizontal X-axis. Σj is the shaded area in Fig. 4, and the index j cor-
responds to the plane where this point is located in [5]. → vj is the unit
velocity vector shown in Fig. 4. Ri, j and βi, j (respectively, Ri′, j and βi′, j ) are failure mechanism.
the polar coordinates of the barycentre of the surface Si, j (respectively, Rate of internal energy dissipation:
Si′, j ) shown in Fig. 5, in which the index i represents the position of this
point in a given plane. ẆD = ∬S c·v·cos φ·dS = ∑ (ci,j·vi,j·Si,j·cos φi,j + ci′,j·vi′,j·Si′,j·cos φi′,j)
Rate of work of the soil’s unit weight Ẇγ is expressed as: i, j (3)

Ẇγ = ∭V →γ ·→v dV = ∑ (→γ ·→vi,j·Vi,j + →γ ·→v i′,j·Vi′,j) In Eq. (3), c is the cohesion of the soil and φ represents the soil’s
i, j frictional angle.
= ω· ∑ (γi, j·Ri, j ·Vi, j·sin βi, j + γi′, j Ri′, j ·Vi′, j·sin βi′, j ) By equating the total rate of external force to the total rate of in-
i, j (2) ternal energy dissipation, the face pressure for collapse is expressed as

where γ is the soil’s unit weight. Vi, j is the volume involved by the

3
S. Zhou, et al.
∑i, j (γi, j Ri, j Vi, j sin βi, j + γi′, j Ri′, j Vi′, j sin βi′, j )
− ∑i, j (ci, j Ri, j Si, j cos φi, j + ci′, j Ri′, j Si′, j cos φi′, j )
σc =
∑j (Σj ·Rj ·cos βj )
where γi, j, ci, j, φi, j and γi′, j, ci′, j, φi′, j are the average values for the trian-
gular facet (Si, j, Si′, j ) illustrated in Fig. 5, respectively.
Then, a two-dimensional failure mechanism that is able to account
for the heterogeneity of the soil shear strength properties was proposed
by Mollon et al. [23], in which the slip surfaces of the failure me-
chanism are not described by log-spirals but by non-standard curves
that are dependent to the spatial varying soil friction angles using a
spatial discretization technique. In the generation process of this failure
mechanism, it is constrained to respect the normality condition of the
limit analysis theory at each point of the failure surfaces. Through the
comparison with numerical simulation did in Mollon et al. [23], this
two-dimensional failure mechanism for nonhomogeneous soils was
shown to give reasonable results in terms of the critical collapse pres-
sure and the failure shape.
Moreover, by combining the 3D Collapse-Failure mechanism of [5]
and the two-dimensional failure mechanism for heterogeneous soils
[23], a failure mechanism was further established by Pan and Dias [6],
in which different values of soil properties can be assigned to the tri-
angular facets during the spatial discretization. The results obtained by
this 3D KA model were also compared with the existing solutions [5],
which showed a good agreement. It is noted that the cases of layered
soils were considered in the study of Pan and Dias [6]. Additionally, the
applications of the KA model for heterogeneous cases can be found in
[8,24,25].
In conclusion, the KA model proposed by Mollon et al. [5] was
firstly applied to the cases of homogeneous soils. Then, a spatial dis-
cretization technique [23] was introduced, which permits to take into
account the heterogeneity of soil properties. In order to describe the
failure shape in the model with a more rational way, the log-spiral
assumption was replaced by non-standard curves determined by the
soil’s frictional angle at each discretized point. Moreover, based on the
comparisons performed in [6–8,23–26], between the KA model and
numerical model for both homogeneous and heterogeneous cases, the
adopted deterministic model is expected to be reliable in the studied
case.
To estimate the failure probabilities against the collapse of a tunnel
face, the performance function in a reliability analysis can be defined
as:
g = σT − σc
where σT is the applied face pressure and σc is the critical face pressure
calculated with the current soil condition. The safe domain is where
g > 0 , while g < 0 refers to the failure case. In the subsequent analysis,
the applied face pressure is set as a constant.
3.2. Probabilistic analysis methods
3.2.1. Kriging
Kriging, based on a Gaussian Process assumption, is a powerful
method for constructing surrogate models [27,28] and it has interesting
characteristics compared with other meta-modeling techniques. First,
the prediction in a point belonging to the design of experiments is the
exact value of the performance function in this point. Furthermore, it
provides not only predicted values, but also estimations of the local
variance of the predictions. This variance defines the local uncertainty
on the prediction. The basic function of the Kriging theory is shown in
Eq. (6).
M (x) = β T f (x) + z(x)
where the first term on the right part of Eq. (6) represents the mean
value of the Gaussian process and βT is the regression coefficients. The
Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507
second term is a stationary Gaussian process with zero mean. In the
present work, the ordinary Kriging is chosen, thus βT f (x ) is a scalar
value to determine. The covariance in the second term between two
(4) points x and w is defined in Eq. (7):
CoV (z (x ), z (w )) = σ 2R (x , w ) (7)
In Eq. (7), σ 2 is the process variance and R (x , w ) represents a cor-
relation function. The correlation function selected in this paper is the
Gaussian model. A detailed description of these parameters can be
found in [29].
3.2.2. Monte Carlo Simulation
Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) permits to estimate the failure
probability by repeatedly running a deterministic model with different
sets of input parameters and then counting the samples that belong to
the failure domain. The CoV for assessing the convergence of MCS is
expressed in Eq. (8) and the Latin Hypercube sampling (LHS) strategy is
employed to generate the Monte Carlo samples. In this work, the size of
samples NMC is set to be large enough in order to obtain the CoV of
failure probability smaller than 5%.
1 − Pf
CoV (Pf ) =
NMC Pf (8)
For reliability analysis, the MCS is considered as a standard re-
ference to verify the results of other methods due to its versatility and
robustness [30]. In the present study, the results obtained by the direct
MCS are used to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of the selected
methodology which is introduced as follows:
In this work, the Adaptive Kriging Monte Carlo Simulation (AK-
MCS) proposed by Echard et al. [28] is adopted for the reliability
analysis. This method can guarantee that the constructed Kriging model
is highly accurate in the vicinity of the limit state surface. This is rea-
lized by gradually adding selected samples to the experimental design
of the Kriging metamodel. In addition, this method requires a lower
number of evaluations of the limit state functions compared with the
direct MCS, thus reducing the total computational time. The flow chart
of the adaptive experimental design algorithm [31] is shown in Fig. 6
and its main characteristics are summarized as follows:
To select the best next candidate sample for the experimental de-
sign, the U-function [28] is chosen as the learning function:
|μg (x )|
U (x ) =
σg (x ) (9)
(5)
where μg (x ) and σg (x ) are the mean and standard deviation of g in Eq.
(5). The next candidate sample, from a MCS candidate pool:
S = {s(1), …, s(NMC) } , is chosen as s∗ = argmins ∈ S U (s ) .
The stopping criterion proposed in [32] is adopted, which directly
focuses on the uncertainty of the failure probability estimation:
P+ −
f − Pf
⩽ ε Pf
P f0 (10)
where =  (μg (x) ⩽ 0),
P f0 =  (μg (x) ∓ 1.96 × σg (x) ⩽ 0) , and ε Pf is
P±f
the threshold for the convergence criterion.
3.2.3. Global sensitivity analysis
A sensitivity analysis aims at quantifying the importance of each
input parameter with respect to the output. Global sensitivity analysis
[33] is a useful approach to implement sensitivity analysis that con-
siders the whole input domain. Specifically, with regard to the case of
dependent input variables, the Kucherenko [34] sensitivity indices are
used in this study.
If the input variables X (Sample with a certain value in X is denoted
(6)
as x ) are divided into two complementary subsets Xv and Xw = X v ,̃
then the following moments can be estimated through N (large enough)
samples of X :
4
S. Zhou, et al. Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507

Fig. 7. The ground formation of the tunnel face in the reference case.

reference case which is defined in Fig. 7. A geological profile con-

sidering three layers is presented and the σT in Eq. (5) is set as 50 kPa.
Besides, the soil variabilities of frictional angle, cohesion and unit
weight are simulated by means of random variables following the dis-
tributions given in Table 1.
The number of samples in the initial experimental design is defined
as [35]: Nini = max(10; 2 M), in which M is the number of input
random variables. The present work involves three soil properties in
three layers. Therefore, the initial experimental design for the AK-MCS,
obtained with the LHS, consists of Nini = 18 samples. The convergence
criterion in Eq. (10) was set to ε Pf = 0.1. In this case, convergence was
achieved after 131 iterations, resulting in a total cost of Ncall = 149
evaluations. An illustration of the convergence of the adaptive process
is plotted in Fig. 8(b), and the estimated P f0, P + −
f , P f given by Eq. (10) are
plotted against the total number of model evaluations, where the area
between the P + −
f and P f stands for a 95% confidence bounds. In
Fig. 8(b), the difference between the P + −
f and P f begins to converge after
about 75 iterations, and finally reaches the convergence criterion in Eq.
(10). The PDF of the face pressure estimated by the AK-MCS is plotted
in Fig. 8(a) and the number of evaluations NMC is equal to 106 . It could
be found that the distribution is nearly normal in the range from 30 to
60 kPa.
The main results of reliability analysis are listed in Table 2, in which
the failure probability and the statistical moments of σc are obtained for
the reference case considering T = 1/4D, L = 1/2D and σT = 50 kPa.
Moreover, the CoV of the failure probability is close to 10-3, indicating a
stable estimation. For the statistical moments, it is shown that the mean
value is 42.31 kPa with a standard deviation of 3.50 kPa.
In Fig. 9, the outcomes of sensitivity analysis (Total Kucherenko
Fig. 6. Flow chart of AK-MCS.
indices) are given, in which the horizontal axis presents the cohesion
(c ), frictional angle (φ ) and the unit weight (γ ) of the three layers. In
N
1 addition, the subscripts bot, mid, top represents the bottom layer, weak
M0 =
N
∑ M (xl) layer and top layer respectively. Because the geometrical construction
l=1 (11)
of the 3D failure surface is based on the frictional angle, it is found that
1
N the soil’s frictional angle influence accounts more than the other two
F=
N
∑ M (xl)2 − M02 properties. Furthermore, φmid has the highest sensitivity index with a
l=1 (12)
value of 0.36, indicating that the frictional angle of the weaklayer
Next, the estimator for the total effect of a variable is formulated by contributes most to the variation of the model response. It is followed
Kucherenko using the following equation: by the unit weight of the middle layer and the frictional angle and
cohesion of the top layer. From Fig. 9, it could also be found that the
1 N
N
∑ j = 1 (M (x v,j, x w,j) − M (x̄ ′v,j, x w,j))2 unit weight of the bottom layer has the lowest importance, whose
SvT =
2F (13) sensitivity index is almost negligible for all cases.
The benefit of implementing the AK-MCS-GSA lies in obtaining ri-
In Eq. (13), the samples x =(x v,x w ) and x ′=(x ′v,x ′w ) are independent
cher information that is not available in the FORM, Second-Order
and identically distributed samples of X . In (x¯′v , x w ) , the overbar
Reliability Method (SORM) and importance sampling (IS) approaches
means that the marked sample x¯′v is conditioned on x w .
which focus on estimating a system failure probability or reliability
index. As given in this section, in addition to failure probability, the AK-
4. Results MCS-GSA is also able to provide the PDF, the statistical moments (Mean
μ and standard deviation S.D.), and the global sensitivity indices of the
4.1. Results of a reference case input parameters. With more information obtained from the presented
reliability and sensitivity analyses, engineers will be able to improve
In this section, the abovementioned methods are applied for a

5
S. Zhou, et al. Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507

(a) (b)
Fig. 8. (a) PDF of the required face pressure. (b) Convergence of the failure probability in the AK-MCS analysis.

Table 2 the direct GSA which is combined with the deterministic model is il-
Estimation of statistical moments and failure probability (Reference case). lustrated in Fig. 9. With regard to the sensitivity indices in this figure,
Failure Probability Statistical moments of the face pressure (kPa)
the estimates given by the Kriging-based GSA are in good agreement
with the results of the direct GSA, revealing a good accuracy of the
Pf CoV (Pf ) Mean Standard deviation employed technique in global sensitivity analysis.
As shown in Table 4, the direct MCS and GSA need nearly 40 h in
1.91 × 10 -2 7.16 × 10 -3 42.31 3.50
total for providing the results in Table 3 and Fig. 9, using a Xeon E5-
2695v2@2.4 GHz server. It is noted that the computational procedure
was implemented in Matlab R2016.b in this study. However, the AK-
MCS-GSA significantly reduces this time to 0.5 h with the same com-
puter and the same simulation platform. The Kriging model training
needs around 30.6 mins while the time required for Kriging-based re-
liability and sensitivity analyses is almost negligible. These comparisons
highlight the accuracy and efficiency of the employed AK-MCS-GSA in
estimating failure probability, face pressure statistics and sensitivity
indices.

4.3. Deterministic comparison between the KA model and a 3D numerical

model

For the kinematical approach (KA) used in this study, Mollon et al.
Fig. 9. Sensitivity analysis results – Comparison between Kriging-based GSA [36–38] studied the collapse failure mechanism in homogeneous soil
and direct GSA. mass and found that the results were close to the solutions given by
complex 3D numerical simulations. Then, Mollon et al. [23] and Pan
the risk estimation and make more reasonable decisions. and Dias [6] extended the original model to nonhomogeneous soils by
using a spatial discretization technique to describe the failure surfaces
4.2. Comparison between the AK-MCS-GSA and traditional approaches and consider the heterogeneity of soil properties.
Therefore, the adopted KA model, based on the mechanism of Pan
In this section, the accuracy and efficiency of the AK-MCS-GSA and Dias [6,8] which can account for soil heterogeneity, is expected to
technique is highlighted by comparing the results with the direct MCS be reliable in the case of layered soils. To further validate the employed
and GSA which are based on the original deterministic model. deterministic model considering a weak soil layer, this section is de-
The comparison with the direct MCS is given in Table 3. The results voted to perform 3D numerical simulations, thus making a comparison
provided by the direct MCS require a higher number of evaluations of between the KA model and the numerical analysis which is based on a
the limit state functions (around 21,000 calls), compared with the AK- finite difference software FLAC3D [39].
MCS with only 149 calls. For the failure probability calculated by the According to the reference case defined in Section 4.1, a numerical
AK-MCS, the outcome is very close to the direct MCS. Moreover, the model of a circular tunnel with diameter D = 10 m under buried depth
error of the mean value and the standard deviation of the applied C = 10 m was created, with three layers as shown in Fig. 7. Due to the
pressure are respectively 0.12% and 1.13%. The CoV of failure prob- symmetry, only half of the system was modelled. The adopted mesh was
ability obtained by AK-MCS is much smaller than the direct MCS. composed by approximately 85,000 elements and 90,000 nodes. As
Furthermore, the comparison between the Kriging-based GSA and
Table 4
Comparison of computational efficiency between AK-MCS-GSA and direct si-
Table 3
mulations.
Reliability analysis results – Comparison between AK-MCS and direct MCS.
MCS GSA Metamodel construction Total time
Method Ncall Pf COV (Pf ) Mean (kPa) S.D. (kPa)
Direct calculation 19.7 h 18.7 h / 38.4 h
Direct MCS 21,000 1.76 × 10 -2 5.16 × 10 -2 42.31 3.54 Kriging-based <1 s <1 s 30.6 min 0.5 h
AK-MCS 18 + 131 1.91 × 10 -2 7.16 × 10 -3 42.26 3.50 Relative error < 9% < 7% / /

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S. Zhou, et al. Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507

Fig. 11. The velocity field of the case 5 in Table 5 (σc = 43.57 kPa ).

Fig. 10. The mesh used in the 3D numerical model for the reference case. [41] or multi-layered soils [25] and reported an error around 10%.
The idea of using the KA model instead of a numerical one is mainly
for alleviating the computational burden for a probabilistic analysis
shown in Fig. 10, the size of the numerical model was taken as 48 m in
which requires normally many deterministic simulations. For one de-
the X direction, 50 m in the Y direction, and 43 m in the Z direction. For
terministic calculation, the numerical model of Fig. 11 needs around 5 h
the displacement boundary conditions, the bottom boundary was as-
while the adopted KA model can reduce it to 6 s. Although an advanced
sumed to be fully fixed and the lateral boundaries were constrained in
reliability method (Adaptive Kriging) is used in this study, it still may
the normal direction. Besides, the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion was
need about one month to provide an accurate Pf estimate if the required
assumed for the soils, and the assumption of a non-associated flow rule
deterministic simulation number is similar to the one of Table 3 (i.e.
was adopted [23]. The considered type of soils for the model is sandy
149). In conclusion, the adopted approach is able to give a relatively
clay.
accurate estimate of σc for the soils with a weak layer but with a greatly
For the comparison, ten different input sets, as shown in Table 5,
reduced calculation time, therefore it could be used in this study for the
were considered. These ten samples were randomly generated from the
reliability and sensitivity analysis. However, it should be noted that an
joint distribution defined in Table 1 together with a correlation coef-
analytical model (e.g. the adopted KA) is usually less accurate than a
ficient of −0.5 for c - φ by using the LHS method. Then, the two models
numerical one, since the boundary conditions cannot be fully con-
were both employed to predict the critical collapse pressure σc for each
sidered and assumptions for the failure shape should be made. In fact,
sample. Concerning the soil elastic properties and the tunnel support
to manage risk and achieve a reliable geotechnical design, a multi-stage
lining parameters which are necessary for a numerical simulation, the
safety assessment is often carried out for a geotechnical project. The
values were taken from a previous study [40]. The stress-control
presented procedure (i.e. KA-Kriging-MCS-GSA), being efficient and
method [40] was coded herein using the FISH language in FLAC3D to
relatively accurate (Tables 4 and 5), is recommended for a first stage.
estimate the critical collapse pressure σc at tunnel face, in which
The multiple results (failure probability, sensitivity indices and model
bracketing and bisection are repeated until the difference between the
response statistics) provided by this procedure can be used for guiding a
upper and lower brackets becomes smaller than 0.1 kPa in this work.
second stage analysis which will potentially be based on a more so-
As an illustration, Fig. 11 presents the total velocity of case 5
phisticated numerical model.
(Table 5) when the support pressure is equal to 43.57 kPa.
Table 5 presents the comparison results. It can be seen that the σc
obtained from the adopted KA model agree reasonably well with those
5. Discussions
provided by the 3D numerical model. The relative errors between the
two models are all lower than 13% and the average is equal to 10% for
The aim of this section is to investigate the effects of several factors
the ten random cases. This indicates that the KA model is effective for
on the critical face pressure, the failure probability and the sensitivity
the soils with a weak layer since the predicted σc is reasonable and
indices. The discussion considers three factors: (1) The applied face
acceptable with an absolute difference being about 4 kPa compared to
pressure; (2) The thickness of the weak layer; (3) The position of the
the 3D numerical results. This finding is consistent with the previous
weak layer.
studies which also performed such a comparison for homogeneous soils

Table 5
The ten random input sets and the comparison between the two models.
Input parameters Output σc

cbot cmid ctop φbot φmid φtop γbot γmid γtop FLAC KA model Relative Error (%)
3D
kPa kPa kPa ° ° ° kN/m3 kN/m3 kN/m3 kPa kPa

5.23 4.18 6.15 22.30 14.89 21.60 19.33 18.47 18.70 38.30 42.32 10.50
14.52 3.60 6.32 16.22 16.21 19.36 20.13 19.29 19.85 41.86 45.6 8.93
10.39 3.97 8.22 19.47 15.44 19.17 18.67 20.06 18.52 39.14 43.14 10.22
6.21 5.08 10.41 23.17 13.01 20.18 18.97 19.20 19.16 37.89 42.12 11.16
6.65 4.71 8.36 16.77 12.99 23.06 20.24 20.63 18.88 43.57 48.53 11.38
8.33 5.49 12.20 17.95 13.10 16.58 17.82 19.44 18.39 39.88 42.96 7.72
5.85 5.97 7.52 20.59 16.23 17.26 19.24 18.10 19.46 38.48 42.05 9.28
8.07 4.40 6.96 18.32 14.56 20.29 19.66 18.35 19.29 40.94 44.85 9.55
6.77 6.51 7.16 20.65 13.35 18.97 18.09 17.31 20.95 42.34 45.92 8.46
9.38 5.32 9.01 18.59 14.66 20.81 18.74 19.91 20.05 38.91 43.85 12.70

7
S. Zhou, et al.
Fig. 12. Influence of the applied face pressure on the failure probability.
5.1. Influence of the applied face pressure
In an attempt to analyse the influence of changing the applied face
pressure on the reliability analysis, complementary calculations are
conducted in this subsection for different values of σT . Other settings are
the same as the reference case defined in Section 4.
The obtained failure probability for the tunnel face stability is given
in Fig. 12 for four σT values ranging between 45 kPa and 60 kPa. It is
shown that when the applied face pressure is equal to 45 kPa, the
failure probability is high, up to 2.15 × 10 - 1, and it decreases fast with
increasing σT . When σT = 60 kPa , the failure probability is 1.02 × 10 - 5,
which means a safe structure in practice.
Fig. 13 shows the Total Kucherenko indices calculated by Eq. (13)
by performing a GSA with respect to the constructed Kriging model
(different applied face pressures are considered). As shown in this
figure, the indices calculated with considering different σT values are
basically the same, meaning that the σT has insignificant effects on the
GSA results. Besides, the sum of the sensitivity indices for the bottom,
middle, and top layer are around 0.1, 0.57 and 0.54 respectively. The
middle layer is indicated to have a higher influence (a sum of 0.57) due
to its lower shear strength parameters. The top layer also has remark-
able impacts, given that the sum of indices is over 0.5 and the cohesion
and unit weight indices in this layer are relatively higher than other
layers. As illustrated in Fig. 3, the volume of the soil zone at the top is
higher than the two other ones, indicating that in this zone the soil
Fig. 13. Global sensitivity for the soil properties considering different applied face pressures.
8
Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507
volume is more important and needs to be stabilized by the applied
pressure.
5.2. Influence of the thickness of weak layer
With regard to the tunnelling case, as the machine drives in a multi-
layered soil mass, the tunnel cross-section often encounters different
ground formations. In other words, changing the position and thickness
of the weak interlayer often happens in practice.
In Fig. 2, it can be seen that the geometry of the weak layer at the
tunnel face is determined by its thickness L and position T. A variation
of the position and of the thickness of the soil layers (stratigraphic
uncertainties) on the tunnel cross-section is usually observed in real
cases. Therefore, they are analysed separately in Section 5.2 and
Section 5.3.
To study the influence of the thickness, the thickness of the weak
layer is modified considering an interval of 1/4D, varied from 0 to D.
The centre of this layer is fixed to the tunnel centre, as shown in Fig. 14.
According to the result plotted in Fig. 15, the larger the thickness of
the weak layer, the greater the tunnel face collapse probability. This
points out that encountering the weak layers can induce a high risk for
the overall structure during excavation. Especially, in comparison with
other range of thickness, it goes up rapidly when the thickness of the
weak layer changes in a range from 1/4D to 1/2D, where the Pf in-
creases from 2.78 × 10 - 4 to 1.94 × 10 - 2 for nearly a hundredfold.
Therefore, when the tunnelling machine is excavating a weak layer in
which the L/D increases slightly from 1/4 to 1/2, the operator should
be careful.
Fig. 15 also indicates a non-linear relation between the Pf estimate
and the weak layer thickness. The Pf is increased with a greater rate
when the L/D is within 1/4 and 1/2 as previously mentioned. This is
probably due to the presence of a dangerous area which can lead to
higher Pf values (will be presented later in Fig. 17). As was found by
Mollon et al. [25] and current study, the most critical range (dangerous
area), which can be defined by considering Pf > 0.02 in Fig. 17, for a
weak layer is not the lowest one, but is located higher than the bottom.
When the L/D increases from 0 to 1/4, the weak layer doesn’t reach the
dangerous area, while as it keeps expanding from 1/4 to 1/2, the weak
layer starts to cover the area. Hence, as the L/D varies from 1/4 to 1/2,
it indeed presents a transition from less dangerous area to the dan-
gerous one, resulting in the increased curve slope in Pf of Fig. 15. Then,
when L/D keeps going from 1/2 to 3/4, the dangerous area is always
covered by the weak layer, thus the slope of the curve is slightly de-
creased compared to the range [1/4, 1/2]. The Pf reaches to 0.24 (a
S. Zhou, et al.
Fig. 14. The thickness of weak layer increases from centre to upper and lower ends.
Fig. 15. Influence of the thickness of weak layer on the tunnel face failure
probability.
relatively high value) when L = 3/4D. Therefore, the corresponding
failure probability would not be increased so much when the L/D in-
creases from 3/4 to 1.
According to the results in Fig. 16, not surprisingly, the sensitivity
index of the weak layer increases as its thickness varies from 0 to D. The
indices of the soil’s frictional angle are also more sensitive as the
thickness changes, since they increase from 0 to 0.67, compared with a
variation of 0.12 and 0.24 for the cohesion and unit weight respec-
tively. Additionally, for the cases where L/D < 1/4, the cohesion and
Fig. 16. Global sensitivity indices for the thickness of weak layer.
9
Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507
the unit weight of the top layer have bigger sensitivity indices com-
pared with other layers’ soil properties, this might be attributed to the
important volume of the top soil which drives the system failure.
5.3. Influence of the position of weak layer
Fig. 17 shows the variation of failure probability as the position of
weak layer moves down from the ground surface (T/D = −1) to the
bottom of the tunnel face (T/D = 1/2), with its thickness fixed as D/2.
In this work, a preliminary search was performed to explore the most
dangerous position. A distance between the lower bound of the weak
layer and the tunnel centre, which equals to 3/8D, seems to correspond
to this position. Therefore, to locate the critical position more precisely,
more points were added when T/D is in the range from 1/4 to 1/2.
In Fig. 17, the interval of horizontal coordinate is set as 1/8 as the
T/D changes from −1 to 1/4, while when T/D is in the range from 1/4
to 1/2, the interval has been reduced to 1/32 for searching the most
dangerous position.
As illustrated in Fig. 17, the maximum failure probability is ob-
served when the distance between the lower bound of the weak layer
and the tunnel centre is equal to 13/32D, revealing that it is the most
dangerous position of the weak layer. In other words, the most critical
position for a weak layer is not located at the invert of the tunnel, but
slightly higher. This result is in accordance with the previous research
of [25] which was performed in a deterministic framework: The most
critical position for a weak layer is not the lowest one but is located
slightly higher. Hence, more attention should be drawn for this position
in practice. It should also be noted that the failure probability increases
S. Zhou, et al.
Fig. 17. Influence of the position of the weak layer on failure probability.
dramatically as the weak layer moves down from T/D = 1/8 (near the
centre of the tunnel cross-section) to T/D = 3/8, with the failure
probability changes from 0.0069 to 0.0327.
The GSA results are plotted in Fig. 18. It is found that the Kucher-
enko indices of the bottom layer decrease as the position of the weak
layer moves from the ground surface to the tunnel invert especially for
the frictional angle while the ones of the three soil properties in the top
layer are similar both in values and the growth trend since the growth
trends of these three curves are basically the same. The above-
mentioned trend for the top and the bottom layer can be attributed to
the proportion of these two layers in terms of the tunnel face.
Additionally, the situation of the weak interlayer is more inter-
esting, as the sensitivity indices peak around 1/8, which is exactly the
suddenly increasing position observed in Fig. 17, revealing that the
variation of failure probability is closely related to the sensitivity in-
dices of the weak layer’s soil properties.
6. Conclusions
Along the tunnel construction path, different scenarios of the soil
layers over the tunnel cross-section are usually encountered in real
cases. Moreover, the intermediate weak layer at the tunnel face has a
great influence on the system performance due to its lower shear
strength parameters. Therefore, to discuss the effect of a weak layer on
the tunnel face stability, this work introduces reliability analysis and
global sensitivity analysis based on an active learning method which
Fig. 18. Global sensitivity for different positions of weak layer.
10
Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507
combines Kriging with Monte Carlo Simulation. Through the estab-
lished metamodel and global sensitivity analysis, engineers are able to
identify the significant soil properties, and thus have better under-
standings of the tunnel face instability with rich information provided
in this work. Furthermore, the deterministic model used in this work is
based on an extension of the classical rotational failure mechanism,
which is able to effectively account for multi-layered soils. A compar-
ison with 3D numerical results indicates that the adopted deterministic
model can give a good estimation of the critical pressure in layered soils
for tunnel face stability. The following conclusions can be drawn from
this study.
1. According to the comparative study of Section 4.2, the employed
AK-MCS-GSA can provide a variety of useful results (e.g. Pf, model
response distribution and sensitivity indices) with a good accuracy.
The total computational time can be significantly reduced by using
this technique,
2. For the reference case, the sensitivity indices reveal that the soil’s
frictional angle of the weak layer has the greatest influence on the
face stability, followed by the cohesion of the top layer, and unit
weight of the weak layer,
3. The failure probability increases rapidly when the thickness of the
weak layer changes in a range from 1/4D to 1/2D, as well as when
the weak layer moves down from T/D = 1/8 to T/D = 3/8,
4. The most dangerous position of the weak layer is highlighted in this
work. It is located slightly higher than the tunnel bottom. This can
S. Zhou, et al.
be served in practice to avoid unfavourable soil conditions. Besides,
the global sensitivity indices of the weak interlayer peak around 1/
8D, which corresponds to the suddenly increasing position of the
failure probability.
In this paper, the soil spatial variability is not considered in the
probabilistic analysis in order to concentrate on analysing the influence
of the weak layer on tunnel face stability from a reliability and sensi-
tivity perspective. Another objective of this paper is to show the idea of
combing the Adaptive Kriging surrogate model with the MCS and GSA
which consists in providing a variety of beneficial results with an ac-
ceptable computational effort. Adopting the random-variables ap-
proach to describe the soil uncertainties is also based on the three
following reasons:
1) The random variable (RV) solution is simpler and can be used in
practice more conveniently compared to the random field (RF) ap-
proach because: (1) quantifying the autocorrelation distance of RFs
requires a large number of measurements which should be geo-lo-
calized; (2) generating RFs and implementing them in deterministic
models require extra computational efforts. Therefore, performing
RF-based probabilistic analysis is not always feasible in practice.
The present study, based on the RV approach, can be employed by
engineers in order to have fast estimates on the target results.
2) Using the RV approach, instead of the RF one, leads to higher Pf
estimates for most cases; thus it can be used for conservative de-
signs. This conclusion has been proven by previous studies [8,42]
for tunnel problems. They found that ignoring the soil spatial
variability would induce a greater variation of the tunnel response
(e.g. σc in [8]); the corresponding Pf estimate is thus higher. This
conclusion is also effective for other geotechnical works as shown by
[18] for dams, [43] for slopes and [44] for foundations.
3) The results obtained by using the RVs can provide first estimates for
the tunnel stability assessment at a preliminary design stage, and
give suggestions for later sophisticated simulations if necessary. For
example, the obtained GSA results are indicators for one to under-
stand which soil parameters contribute most to the model response
variation. Then, more attention could be paid to these parameters by
conducting more relevant tests in a second design stage in order to
better quantify them or performing a parametric study to investigate
the effect of their distribution parameters on the Pf.
However, it could be of interest for a future work to consider the soil
spatial variability and investigate its effect on the tunnel face stability
within a weak-layer context from both reliability and sensitivity per-
spectives.
Additionally, it might happen that the soil property of the weak
layer is higher than its nearby soil even though the mean values of the
top and the bottom layer are set to be higher. This can be avoided by
assuming a positive correlation between the soil parameters of the weak
layer and of the top/bottom layer. Considering such positive correla-
tions could also be investigated in future works.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Siyang Zhou: Methodology, Formal analysis, Validation, Writing -
original draft. Xiangfeng Guo: Conceptualization, Software, Writing -
review & editing. Qian Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision.
Daniel Dias: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing,
Supervision. Qiujing Pan: Methodology, Software, Resources.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
11
Computers and Geotechnics 122 (2020) 103507
Acknowledgements
The first author thanks the China Scholarship Council for providing
a joint Ph.D. Scholarship in this research in France. The authors also
wish to thank anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful criticism that
contributed to an improvement of this work.
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