Abstract: In view of the constant innovations in the design and manufacturing technology of TBMs and in response to the urgent demand for research and development of intelligent highend equipment, the authors summarize the technical characteristics of intelligent TBMs, and define the basic capability requirements of intelligent TBMs, that is, focusing on the safe and efficient tunneling of TBMs and deeply integrating the new generation of information technology with the industrialization of the tunnel construction to enable selfsensing, selfjudging, selflearning, selfdecisionmaking, and selfimplementing of TBMs. The authors introduce the status of researches on intelligent TBMs, and design the overall framework of intelligent TBMs from three levels: the sensing level, the platform level, and the application level. In terms of the realization of the intelligent TBMs, the authors detail the key tasks, including realtime sensing and identifying the complex environmental geological conditions and the equipment status, intelligent decisionmaking and parameter optimization, R&D of robot for automatic implementation of key construction processes, logistic systems for intelligent TBMs, and "edgecloud" collaboration of TBMs. Finally, the authors establish an intelligent TBM evaluation index system covering the intelligence index and the capability index, and propose an intelligent TBM evaluation method.

Key words: intelligent TBM, environment sensing, intelligent decisionmaking, automatic implementation, "edgecloud" collaboration, evaluation system