The simulation of the advancing process for arbitrary alignments during shield tunneling requires a continuous adaption of the nite element mesh in the vicinity
of the tunnel face in conjunction with a steering algorithm for the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) advance. Moreover, the nite element mesh should match the actual motion path of the shield machine resulting from the FE-analysis in each excavation step. For this purpose, a technique to automatize the process of mesh generation based on hybrid mesh approach is proposed in which a new computational mesh in the vicinity of the tunnel face will be automatically generated within the advancing process. This contribution is concerned with the 3D automatic mesh generation of nite element models for numerical simulations of shield driven tunneling processes.