ABSTRACT
This chapter presents how remote sensing technologies may usher in a new generation of city-scale methods for tunnel damage prediction. It demonstrates how aerial laser scanning, hyperspectral imagery, thermal imagery, and unmanned aerial vehicles may represent key enabling technologies to achieving this goal. Predicted world population increases coupled with urbanization trends will result in ever heightened use of subsurface spaces, which means deeper and larger excavations and more extensive tunnelling. Damage to structures of cultural importance or historic value may also lead to the loss of public support, protests and bad publicity, and therefore threaten the prospect of future tunnelling projects. A greenfield settlement prediction is commonly employed as an initial step in determining the risk to existing buildings due to tunnelling-induced settlement. The overall geometry must be reported with respect to the larger environment and most specifically the tunnel alignment.
