Abstract During slurry shield tunneling, it is essential to monitor ground surface settlement and adjust the tunneling parameters of the shield machine accordingly. By leveraging the automated machine learning (AutoML) framework AutoGluon, a predictive model for the average ground surface settlement in front of the shield machine's cutterhead is rapidly constructed. The AG model is then utilized as an objective function, and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to optimize the pressure in the slurry shield machine's bubble chamber. The AG model, without hyperparameter tuning, achieves good performance in predicting the average settlement in front of the shield, and it even outperforms hyperparameter-tuned models like RF, SVM, and XGBoost in terms of accuracy and stability for this task. The optimized bubble chamber pressure, adjusted by PSO, when applied to typical sections, shows that the AG-PSO-based optimization of slurry shield tunneling parameters has a positive effect on controlling the average ground surface settlement. Implementing a real-time optimization system for the slurry shield's bubble chamber pressure in actual engineering projects can effectively reduce ground surface settlement alarms and achieve optimal control of the slurry shield tunneling parameters.