Challenges in data-driven site characterization

TLDR

Site characterisation is essential in geotechnical engineering, and data‑driven approaches—leveraging both project‑specific and legacy data—raise questions about their achievable value and practical scalability, yet the engineering community remains unconvinced of their transformative potential. The paper identifies three scientific challenges to data‑driven site characterisation: ugly data, site recognition, and stratification. The authors propose a research agenda that clarifies these challenges, establishes benchmarks, and translates findings into software to accelerate practice.

Abstract

Site characterisation is a cornerstone of geotechnical and rock engineering. “Data-driven site characterisation” refers to any site characterisation methodology that relies solely on measured data, both site-specific data collected for the current project and existing data of any type collected from past stages of the same project or past projects at the same site, neighbouring sites, or beyond. It is an open question what data-driven site characterisation (DDSC) can achieve and how useful are the outcomes for practice, but this “value of data” question is of major interest given the rapid pace of digital transformation in many industries. The scientific aspects of this question are presented as three challenges in this paper: (1) ugly data, (2) site recognition, and (3) stratification. The practical aspect that cannot be ignored is how to scale any solution to a realistic 3D setting in terms of size and complexity at reasonable cost. No deployment in practice is possible otherwise. At this point, the practicing community at large has yet to be convinced what data, big or small, could do to transform current practice. The authors believe that we need a more purposeful agenda to hasten research in this direction that would include articulating clearer statements for the challenges, developing benchmarks to compare solutions, and bringing research to practice through software.