Dynamic Safety and Risk Assessment of Tunnel Construction: Leveraging Systems Engineering through Sigma Modeling

Tunnel construction appears to be a challenging task that requires extensive design, detailed pre-planning, and geological input while encompassing dynamic and comprehensive safety and risk assessments to ensure project success and protect stakeholders. By leveraging the power of systems engineering, the modeling of a tunnel project can be accomplished, which will offer a comprehensive understanding of all subsystems, ensuring that complex relationships between all the components are well comprehended and controlled. This study investigates the applicability and compatibility of utilizing Sigma modeling language and WordLabTM Workshop modeling environment to model a tunnel project from the systems engineering point of view, demonstrating the ability to integrate multiple activities in a single cohesive model. With its graphical user interface, the WorldLab^TM Workshop enables the easy execution of compilation and simulation tasks, which serves as a virtual laboratory for performing interactive and stochastic simulations. The use of systems engineering facilitates the visualization and analysis of the complex interrelationships among various project components, hence enabling the identification of possible risks and operational safety issues. In addition, complex scenarios can be tested through modeling of this kind, allowing project managers to assess the effects of different factors and, consequently, create an interactive knowledge-based system that clearly defines a framework for collaboration and risk mitigation throughout the project. The outcome of simulations implicates that safety and risk management can be addressed proactively by leveraging the combination of system dynamics and Sigma modeling, which will lead to better operational performance. Thus, the study implies a novel perspective on safety management in tunnel engineering, providing practitioners with unprecedented insights.

Keywords: Systems engineering, Tunnel project, Safety and risk management, Sigma, Construction safety, Predictive analytics, Dynamic modeling.