ABSTRACT

While tunneling customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, the tunneling construction sector remains severely under-digitized. Mechanized tunneling construction is among the most innovative areas in the construction industry, however, this industry depends on expert skills and experience to deliver the project successfully. Building a unified analytics center to gather, integrate, and analyze data from disparate databases on a construction site (e.g., TBM itself, conveyor system, inventory, schedule, and daily activity reports) and then contextualize this information into a visual, meaningful representation provides a robust tool to enhance instant, and far-off decision-making for all levels of site and office personnel. In this paper, the application of a unified analytics center in tunneling construction is introduced. Dugway Storage Tunnel project is considered as a case study. Throughout the construction period of the tunnel, vast quantities of data from TBM sensors is pulled out and streamed directly from TBM’s PLC. Data is then pushed into Power BI, which is an analytics service provided by Microsoft. This system connects the project personnel (e.g., Project manager, Construction manager, Project engineer, and Site Engineers) to a broad range of data via easy-to-use dashboards, interactive reports, and meaningful interactive visualizations that bring data to life.