Establishing an ANN-Based Risk Model for Ground Subsidence Along Railways

Ground subsidence occurrences have drastically increased in the Seoul area of the Republic of Korea. The structural defects of underground utilities were found to be the primary cause of ground subsidence based on several field investigations. This paper presents a risk model that assesses the probability of occurrence of ground subsidence along railways. In this study, support vector machine (SVM) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) approaches were successfully employed to develop an artificial neural network (ANN)-based risk model. The risk model, in conjunction with a database composed of underground utilities and geological boring data along urban railway networks, was utilized to develop a hazard map system. A limited field experimental program was conducted for the purpose of verification, resulting in a promising tool to effectively maintain railway networks.