An Interdisciplinary Systematic Review on Sustainability in Tunneling—Bibliometrics, Challenges, and Solutions

Abstract

Sustainability is defined by current research as an interdisciplinary field comprising environmental, social, and economic aspects. This paper presents a systematic literature review following the PRISMA guidelines investigating how authors currently view sustainability issues in the specific context of tunneling. Thereby, we introduce a new methodology for reviewing sustainability aspects in an interdisciplinary way, where key bibliographic metrics are derived from the metadata of the reviewed literature. Regarding the content of the articles, we cluster sustainability aspects into specific topics and discuss challenges and solutions. In addition, we examine the role of digital technologies applied in sustainable tunneling. Our results show that there is a lack of interdisciplinary studies and that the current research does not represent all three dimensions of sustainability equally. The current research focuses on assessing the status quo instead of presenting specific solutions. Finally, we see great potential to further leverage digital tools to enable sustainable tunneling.

Green Tunnel Solutions: An Overview of Sustainability Trends in the Last Decade (2013–2022)

“…A multidisciplinary approach to the review of the topic of sustainability was proposed by Huymajer et al [10]. Following this approach, we proposed a systematic literature review to investigate sustainable green tunnel solutions.…”

“…The decision to use Scopus instead of Google Scholar or Web of Science arose from the need to choose a database that provided structured data about the publications and citations, and information about the author. Moreover, Scopus indexes more journals and covers more modern materials than other databases [10,15,16]. A collection of 409 documents were used as a starting point from which to classify input word strings, specifically query inputs (see Table 1):…”

“…Our research identified the main topics and their trends over time, prolific authors and the level of co-authorship among the authors [23]. Previous researchers have applied bibliometric analysis to inspect sustainability in tunnelling through an interdisciplinary vision without the use of a science map approach [10]. Other studies have performed bibliometric analyses using VOSviewer [24,25].…”

Digital Transformation in Tunneling – A Project Report on TransIT

“…A collaboration of different research areas, such as civil engineering, geology, hydrology, and computer science, is crucial for the digital transformation of the tunneling sector. However, it has been shown that there is limited cooperation between different fields within the scientific tunneling community (HUYMAJER, WOE-GERBAUER, WINKLER et al, 2022). Moreover, there is insufficient collaboration between teaching, research, and industry.…”

The Cross-Postgraduate Training Mode Driven by Intelligent Signal Processing Technology: Taking the Major of Finance as an Example

“…Postgraduate education is an important part of higher education, which should adapt to the times, trends, actively respond to the call of interdisciplinary, break professional boundaries, integrate disciplinary resources, realize cooperation between departments, etc. [18], to cultivate a large number of compound outstanding technical talents for scientific and technological progress, industrial upgrading, and social progress [19,20].…”