SETDISC a Software for Joint Classification Based on Poisson Clustering

Determining the number and characteristics of joint sets is of great importance in any rock engineering operation. One of the most important characteristics of discontinuities is their orientation، relative both to each other and to any engineering structure or excavation face. In order to determine the number of joint sets، usually stereographic methods are used. This method mainly depends on the personal judgment therefore; separation of joint sets is very difficult when overlap occurs. In this paper، an algorithm is proposed according to Poisson process to determine the number and characteristics of joint sets. Discontinuities that are found in a region of defined dip and dip direction with a probability of more than a random event are put together in a group، so that dip، dip direction and clustering degree (i. e. the distribution of joints around a definite center) of that group can be determined. SETDISC program has been written in Fortran 90 language based on the proposed algorithm. To validate the proposed algorithm in SETDISC، 420 discontinuities of 11 scan line are analyzed and the computed results are compared by the results obtained by Dips. This comparison shows that the proposed algorithm has no personal judgment and can be used practically as a quantitative approach in joint clustering.