Spline Surface Approximation for Computing Pit Excavation Volume with the Free Boundary Conditions

The calculation of earthwork plays a major role in plan or design of many civil engineering projects, and thus it has become very important to improve the accuracy of earthwork calculation. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for finding a cubic spline surface with the free boundary conditions, which interpolates the given three dimensional data, by using B-spline and an accurate method to estimate pit-excavation volume. The proposed method should be of interest to surveyors especially concerned with accuracy of volume computations. We present some computational results showing that our proposed method provides good accuracy.