GEOMONITORING OF STABILITY STATE OF CAREER SLOPES

The development of geomechanical monitoring of the state of near-surface arrays of quarries is an urgent task for predicting and ensuring the stability of quarry slopes. This is preceded by a detailed study of the geological and geological situation of instrument massifs, the laying of reference and working benchmarks, the methodology for measuring and analyzing the obtained displacements of instrument massifs. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the accuracy of instrumental observations with the help of an electronic total station and an optical reflector, as well as to the identification of optimal observation schemes at the quarry, which make it possible to establish rational parameters for making measurements. The distance between the reflector and the total station is set to 500m, which allows measurements to be made within ± 3 mm. The proposed measurement technique was tested in the quarries of Kazakhstan.

The Estimation of the Building’s Vertical Shifts and Construction Groundworks on the Basis of Deformation Network Element Analysis

The growth of intensity of impact on the ground service related to the development of underground and terrestrial space, as well as to the volumes of building various objects, determines the increase of requirements to the control of deformation processes, and, hence, the development of geodetic observation methods. This is especially referred to megalopolises, where the surveyors have to work in more and more constrained conditions. The authors offer the way of estimating the vertical shift, using the independent measurements and involving the whole deformation network. It is about its model type and element examinations, which are links in the leveling run or triangles in planar case. The space position of these elements during the model-based examination is invariant in regard to the reference frame (benchmark). Therefore, the independent measurements can be performed (using vacant stations) during the observation cycles and the shifted and non-shifted elements of the model (deformation network) can be estimated in regard to the previous cycle. The identifying of the deformation control benchmarks is performed in regard to the non-shifted (stable) model elements. The methodic of fulfilling this technology, its advantages over the traditional ones, as well as the observation schemes, are shown.

Estimating the distance to an epidemic threshold

The epidemic threshold of the susceptible–infected–recovered model is a boundary separating parameters that permit epidemics from those that do not. This threshold corresponds to parameters where the system's equilibrium becomes unstable. Consequently, we use the average rate at which deviations from the equilibrium shrink to define a distance to this threshold. However, the vital dynamics of the host population may occur slowly even when transmission is far from threshold levels. Here, we show analytically how such slow dynamics can prevent estimation of the distance to the threshold from fluctuations in the susceptible population. Although these results are exact only in the limit of long-term observation of a large system, simulations show that they still provide useful insight into systems with a range of population sizes, environmental noise and observation schemes. Having established some guidelines about when estimates are accurate, we then illustrate how multiple distance estimates can be used to estimate the rate of approach to the threshold. The estimation approach is general and may be applicable to zoonotic pathogens such as Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV) as well as vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.