Risk assessment of karst water inrush in tunnel engineering based on improved game theory and uncertainty measure theory

The sudden inrush of water poses a serious threat to the safety of workers during tunnel construction in the karst region of southwest China. To mitigate this risk, a model is proposed to assess the risk of water surge through a tunnel by combining improved game theory with uncertainty measure theory. Eight indicators of risk were extracted based on the solubility of rock, its geological structure, capacity for surface catchment, and hydrogeological factors, and were incorporated into the proposed model. The subjective weights of these indicators were obtained using the analytic hierarchy process, while their objective weights were calculated through the entropy weighting method and the criteria importance through intercriteria correlation method. An improved game theory-based method of combinatorial weighting was then used to construct the corresponding weight vectors. Single-indicator measurement functions and multi-indicator measurement matrices were utilized to classify and evaluate the indicators of the risk of a surge in water level based on a confidence criterion. The proposed method was applied to five typical karst sections of the Yanjin Tunnel of the Chongqing–Kunming High-speed Railway Project, and the method was validated by comparing the recorded and estimated inflow volume ranges during the project’s construction, showing consistency with the actual evaluation results. This proposed model thus offers a practical tool for assessing the risk of water inrush in karst tunnels.