Abstract:
Organic soil deposits under road embankments may cause consolidation settlement
problems during the serviceability stage. It is not feasible to design road traces on such soil deposits
using the traditionally used most unfavourable ground conditions. Instead the most probable ground
conditions are used in the initial design and this approach is referred to as the observational
approach. The risks associated with using most probable soil properties are managed by reviewing
the initial design through the analysis of the observational data obtained during the construction
stage. In this regards, analysis tools to assess the stability of the embankment during construction
stage and the estimation of the degree of consolidation during ground improvement phase are
extremely important. Even though there are large number of analytical methods available to use for
the data analysis, not much research is done to identify the tools relevant to the organic soft soils
found in Sri Lanka. This research is aimed at investigation of the analytical tools that can be used in
the analysis of settlement monitoring data obtained during the implementation of the observational
approach for construction of the road embankments over the soft soil deposits in Sri Lanka.
