Transportation is the lifeblood of a country, the foundation and leading industry of the national economy. The economic development of a country largely depends on the state of its transportation development.
Mountainous and hilly areas account for approximately 69% of my country's total land area. Due to past shortages in road construction funds, roads built in mountainous or hilly areas were mostly winding mountain roads. These roads are not only of low grade, have long detours, and occupy a large amount of arable land, but also suffer from high energy consumption, numerous safety hazards, and significant ecological damage, resulting in frequent traffic accidents, causing huge economic losses and numerous casualties.
Tunnel construction is a crucial measure for improving highway standards and achieving resource-saving and environmentally friendly transportation. It is also a vital engineering facility for realizing high-speed, efficient, and safe transportation, playing an irreplaceable role in the development of modern highway transportation. With rapid economic development and the ever-expanding scale of highway construction, new surveying and design concepts have matured, and construction technologies have continuously improved, leading to the rapid development of highway tunnel construction in my country. The following figure shows the national highway tunnel trend statistics from 1987 to 2008:
Currently, China's highway tunnel construction technology is relatively advanced, but the development of supporting systems such as ventilation, disaster prevention and mitigation, and monitoring is lagging behind. The State Council's "National Medium- and Long-Term Science and Technology Development Plan Outline" prioritizes "transportation infrastructure construction and maintenance technology and equipment," "intelligent traffic management systems," and "transportation safety and emergency response" within the transportation industry. It also emphasizes the need to focus on researching and developing "traffic accident prevention, early warning, and emergency response technologies; developing active and passive safety technologies for transportation vehicles; traffic accident reconstruction technologies; traffic emergency response systems; and rapid search and rescue technologies." Traffic safety has thus become one of the priority development themes in the transportation industry.
Due to the unique environment of tunnels, tunnel safety and the stability of tunnel management are the most important performance indicators for tunnel operation. Therefore, tunnels have extremely high requirements for monitoring systems such as ventilation, lighting, and traffic control. The performance indicators of industrial software products and network performance are crucial to the safe and stable operation of the entire system. Establishing a complete tunnel monitoring system using modern control theories and advanced monitoring equipment to regulate traffic flow, control tunnel ventilation and lighting, and prevent accidents before they occur is particularly important for improving the safety, speed, and comfort of tunnel travel.
