Abstract: Soft soils are deposited in most of China’s coastal areas. Due to the low permeability and high compressibility of these soft soils, the embankment settlement pattern in these areas is very complicated, which is greatly increased the difficulty in the settlement prediction. In order to have a better settlement estimation of embankment in soft soils, this paper extensively validates various empirical methods such as hyperbolic method, exponential smoothing method, etc. On this basis, combined with the embankment settlement data of the specific soft soil areas, these methods are evaluated and compared. The results show that the cubic exponential smoothing method can accurately and reliably predict the embankment settlement in soft soils; the hyperbolic method is not suitable for predicting the embankment settlement in soft soils.

Key words: soft soils, subgrade settlement, prediction method, settlement monitoring data