Toward ecological environmental risk for spoil ground group management in mega projects
Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management
ISSN: 0969-9988
Article publication date: 19 May 2023
Abstract
Purpose
The numerous spoil grounds brought about by mega transportation infrastructure projects which can be influenced by the ecological environment. To achieve better management of spoil grounds, this paper aims to assess their comprehensive risk levels and categorize them into different categories based on ecological environmental risks.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on analysis of the environmental characteristics of spoil grounds, this paper first comprehensively identified the ecological environmental risk factors and developed a risk assessment index system to quantitatively describe the comprehensive risk levels. Second, this paper proposed a comprehensive model to determine the risk assessment and categorization of spoil ground group in mega projects integrating improved projection pursuit clustering (PPC) method and K-means clustering algorithm. Finally, a case study of a spoil ground group (includes 50 spoil grounds) in a mega infrastructure project in western China is presented to demonstrate and validate the proposed method.
Findings
The results show that our proposed comprehensive model can efficiently assess and categorize the spoil grounds in the group based on their comprehensive ecological environmental risk. In addition, during the process of risk assessment and categorization of spoil grounds, it is necessary to distinguish between sensitive factors and nonsensitive factors. The differences between different categories of spoil grounds can be recognized based on nonsensitive factors, and high-risk spoil grounds which need to be focused more on can be identified according to sensitive factors.
Originality/value
This paper develops a comprehensive model of risk assessment and categorization of a group of spoil grounds based on their ecological environmental risks, which can provide a reference for the management of spoil grounds in mega projects.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71942006 and 72071219), the First-Class Academic Discipline Construction Project of Central University of Finance and Economics (Grant No. 20190807-8) and the Research and Innovation Team Support Program Funding Project of Central University of Finance and Economics (Grant No. CUFE-2021-GG-1).
Citation
Li, Y., Yao, Z., Wu, J., Zeng, S. and Wu, G. (2023), "Toward ecological environmental risk for spoil ground group management in mega projects", Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/ECAM-10-2022-1003
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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