• Journal of Korean Tunnelling and Underground Space Association
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.469-484
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• 2021

Rock mass classification results have a great influence on construction schedule and budget as well as tunnel stability in tunnel design. A total of 3,526 tunnels have been constructed in Korea and the associated techniques in tunnel design and construction have been continuously developed, however, not many studies have been performed on how to assess rock mass quality and grade more accurately. Thus, numerous cases show big differences in the results according to inspectors' experience and judgement. Hence, this study aims to suggest a more reliable rock mass classification (RMR) model using machine learning algorithms, which is surging in availability, through the analyses based on various rock and rock mass information collected from boring investigations. For this, 11 learning parameters (depth, rock type, RQD, electrical resistivity, UCS, V_p, V_s, Young's modulus, unit weight, Poisson's ratio, RMR) from 13 local tunnel cases were selected, 337 learning data sets as well as 60 test data sets were prepared, and 6 machine learning algorithms (DT, SVM, ANN, PCA & ANN, RF, XGBoost) were tested for various hyperparameters for each algorithm. The results show that the mean absolute errors in RMR value from five algorithms except Decision Tree were less than 8 and a Support Vector Machine model is the best model. The applicability of the model, established through this study, was confirmed and this prediction model can be applied for more reliable rock mass classification when additional various data is continuously cumulated.