Problematic soils exist almost everywhere on the globe. State-of-the-art solutions to make civil engineering infrastructures built on them are still highly sought. The CFG (cement-fly ash-gravel) pile composite foundation system has been widely used in buildings, highways, railways, and bridge transition sections owing to its proven engineering characteristics in soft ground treatment. This paper discusses about the development and achievements of its engineering applications, along with possible future research directions. The remarkable evolution took place in the past to address projects’ strict differential and postconstruction settlement control requirements including embedding the geosynthetic layer into the load transfer platform and combining it with rigid slabs, as seen implemented in few CFG pile-supported embankments. It was also observed that the interaction of the existing CFG pile composite foundation with an adjacent new foundation pit excavation inevitably presents a complex soil-structure interaction mechanism among the fundamental components—the retaining wall, mat, piles, cushion, and soil.

Foundation pit excavation engineering is an old subject full of decision making. Yet, it still deserves further research due to the associated high failure cost and the complexity of the geological conditions and/or the surrounding existing infrastructure around it. This article overviews the risk control practice of foundation pit excavation projects in close proximity to existing disconnected piled raft. More focus is given to geotechnical aspects. The review begins with achievements to ensure excavation performance requirements, and follows to discuss the complex soil structure interaction involved among the fundamental components: the retaining wall, mat, piles, cushion, and the soil. After bringing consensus points to practicing engineers and decision makers, it then suggests possible future research directions.

Ensuring the safety of existing structures is an important issue when planning and executing adjacent new foundation pit excavations. Hence, understanding the stress state conditions experienced by the soil element behind a retaining wall at a given location during different excavation stages has been a key observational modelling aspect of the performance of excavations. By establishing and carrying out sophisticated soil–structure interaction analyses, stress paths render clarity on soil deformation mechanism. On the other hand, column-type soft ground treatment has recently got exceeding attention and practical implementation. So, the soil stress–strain response to excavation-induced disturbances needs to be known as well. To this end, this paper discusses the stress change and redistribution phenomena in a treated ground based on 3D numerical analyses. The simulation was verified against results from a 1 g indoor experimental test conducted on composite foundation reinforced with long and short cement–fly ash–gravel (CFG) pile adjacent to a moving rigid retaining wall. It was observed that the stress path for each monitoring point in the shallow depth undergoes a process of stress unloading at various dropping amounts of principal stress components in a complex manner. The closer the soil element is to the wall, the more it experiences a change in principal stress components as the wall movement progresses; also, the induced stress disturbance weakens significantly as the observation point becomes farther away from the wall. Accordingly, the overall vertical load-sharing percentage of the upper soil reduces proportionally.