ADVERTORIAL | TOTALITE
TUNNEL MONITORING’S REAL BOTTLENECK ISN’T THE SENSOR: IT’S THE DATA SILO
A UK case study shows continuous optical monitoring can match an automated total station
to within 2mm next to live construction. The bigger opportunity is what happens once that data stops sitting in silos. Epco Berger, Managing Director of TotaLite takes a look.
Right: An automated total station monitors displacement inside an operational UK tunnel; the established method TotaLite’s compact optical sensor was benchmarked against.
Below: Academy Geomatics installs monitoring targets during a short tunnel shutdown, timed around maintenance work already scheduled for the same window.
Ask most tunnelling engineers whether the industry at large understands how tunnels deform, and the answer is generally yes. Convergence, lateral movement, joint displacement: the mechanisms are well documented, and the risk they pose to nearby works and to the tunnel itself is not in dispute - but this was never really the constraint.
The constraint is what happens to the data once it’s
collected. Across most projects, movement readings stay with one contractor, on one project, often on one shift’s logbook. They are rarely compared across tunnels, rarely pooled across organisations, and rarely built into anything a machine-learning model could learn from at scale. That’s the actual gap standing between tunnelling and the kind of condition-based decision-making that other infrastructure sectors (rail, aviation, automotive) already take for granted: acting on a continuous signal instead of a fixed inspection schedule. Closing that gap starts with an unglamorous
requirement: monitoring has to be deployable everywhere it’s needed, including the tightest, most operationally sensitive sections of a live tunnel and not just the sections where a bulky instrument happens to fit.
THE HIGHEST-STAKES TEST: MONITORING NEXT TO LIVE CONSTRUCTION We saw this clearly during a project with Academy Geomatics on an operational UK tunnel. Academy Geomatics was tasked with designing a monitoring
22 | October 2026
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