Research Progress on Multi-Hazard Disaster Mechanisms, Monitoring, Early Warning and Control in Underground Engineering

Abstract

Underground engineering is increasingly exposed to complex geological conditions, intensive urban constraints, and long service periods. Disasters rarely arise from a single defective component; they usually develop through interactions among geological uncertainty, excavation disturbance, groundwater migration, support response, construction organization, and delayed deterioration. This paper presents a critical review of the mechanisms, monitoring methods, and prevention strategies associated with major underground-engineering hazards, including collapse, water and mud inrush, squeezing deformation, rockburst, ground settlement, harmful-gas and fire events, and structural deterioration. A source–pathway–response framework is used to explain how local damage evolves into system-level failure and cascading consequences. Analytical, numerical, physical-model, field-monitoring, and data-driven approaches are compared with respect to applicability, interpretability, and uncertainty. The review shows that conventional single-index warning and static safety assessment are inadequate for rapidly changing ground conditions. More reliable practice requires multi-source geological prediction, continuous deformation and seepage sensing, physics-informed data fusion, and decision thresholds linked directly to construction actions. An integrated closed-loop framework is therefore proposed that connects investigation, scenario analysis, monitoring, diagnosis, adaptive control, emergency response, and post-event model updating. The principal research needs are uncertainty-aware prediction, transferable warning models, coupled multi-hazard simulation, resilient support systems, and life-cycle digital twins. The review provides a structured basis for transforming underground disaster control from isolated hazard treatment to adaptive, risk-informed, and resilience-oriented management.