Land Subsidence Prediction and Analysis along Typical High-Speed Railways in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Plain Area

Abstract

High-speed railways in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH) Plain are gradually becoming more widespread, covering a greater area. The operational safety of high-speed railways is influenced by the continuous development of land subsidence. It is necessary to predict the subsidence along the high-speed railways; thus, this work is of critical importance to the safety of high-speed railway operation. In this study, we processed Sentinel-1A data using the Persistent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PS-InSAR) technique to acquire the land subsidence in the typical BTH area. Then, we combined the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) methods (EMD-GBDT) to forecast land subsidence along high-speed railways. The results revealed that some parts of the high-speed railways in the BTH plain had passed through or approached the land subsidence area; the maximum cumulative subsidence of the Beijing–Shanghai, Tianjin–Baoding and Shijiazhuang–Jinan high-speed railways reached 326 mm, 384 mm and 350 mm, respectively. The forecasting accuracy for land subsidence along high-speed railways was enhanced by the EMD-GBDT model. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) were 0.38 mm to 0.56 mm and 0.23 mm to 0.38 mm, respectively.