For many years the Austrian tunneling industry has demanded that research is urgently required to establish a theoretical basis for the New Austrian TUnneling Method and to assist site engineers in the often difficult day to day decisions. In particular it was felt that numerical models need to be improved considerably in order to be able to act as useful tools in predicting soil/rock mass behavior during tunneling. The required improvement not only refers to the quality of the models but also to their ease of use. As long as an experienced modeler is required to spend days in preparing the...

This book discusses the introduction of isogeometric technology to the boundary element method (BEM) in order to establish an improved link between simulation and computer aided design (CAD) that does not require mesh generation. In the isogeometric BEM, non-uniform rational B-splines replace the Lagrange polynomials used in conventional BEM. This may seem a trivial exercise, but if implemented rigorously, it has profound implications for the programming, resulting in software that is extremely user friendly and efficient. The BEM is ideally suited for linking with CAD, as both rely on the...