## 1 Introduction  
The surrounding rocks in the roadway may show zonal disintegration characteristics at a great burial depth or under high stress, i.e., obviously fractured zones and complete zones appear alternately in shallow and deep surrounding rocks [1]. This phenomenon was revealed as early as 1972 by [PERSON] [2]. Scholars from South Africa and China also observed zonal disintegration phenomena later in deep mining [3, 4, 5, 6]. Zonal disintegration is currently recognized as a common phenomenon in deep roadways [7] and has become a hotspot in rock mechanics and rock engineering. In general, zonal integration is the key feature of roadway damage in deep mining. Gaining in-depth knowledge on its formation mechanisms and patterns can provide insightful references for addressing the control problems of the surrounding rocks in deep roadways [7; 8; 9].  
Scholars have first investigated zonal integration based on field borehole measurements. By arranging the drilling holes along the periphery of the roadway in a cross-section, the alternate appearance of disintegration and complete zones was confirmed in the drilling holes via borehole TV survey and ultrasonic perspective examination. It was thus derived that the disintegration zone and the complete zones appeared alternately around the roadway, approximately in a circular-ring pattern [4; 5; 6]. The related studies were mainly focused on the reproduction of alternate distribution characteristics in the laboratory. Some scholars conducted physical experiments but failed to obtain the obvious zonal disintegration phenomenon [10; 11; 12]; others did not obtain annularly-distributed disintegration in the roadway-surrounding rocks from physical analog experiments but found the distribution of the fractures in the section parallel to the roadway [13]. Accordingly, they deduced that the spatial distribution of conjugated shear zones can explain zonal disintegration. Afterward, scholars placed their research emphasis on annular zonal disintegration. They concluded that the approximately annularly zonal disintegration effect was due to the nonuniform settings of the mechanical parameters of the surrounding rocks in the roadway [14]. [PERSON] et al. simulated the development characteristics of the fractures in homogeneous surrounding rocks based on a bilinear strain-softening ubiquitous-joint model in FLAC\({}^{\text{2D}}\). Nevertheless, they did not observe annular disintegration zones in alternate patterns [15].  
Investigating the zonal disintegration patterns of the surrounding rocks in the roadway via physical experiments or numerical simulation was crucial for validating field measurement results and provided the foundation for further analyzing the mechanisms and related influencing factors. Since fractures in the surrounding rocks involved the rock fracturing process, the latter was successfully simulated by the discrete element method. Based on the research results in roadway support engineering, this study first conducted a numerical simulation of the development of zonal disintegration in the surrounding rocks during deformation and fracture processes in high-stress and deep high-stress roadways via PFC\({}^{\text{2D}}\) 5.00 and FLAC\({}^{\text{2D}}\) 7.00 software packages. The performed numerical simulation clarified the effects of the surrounding rock's mechanical parameters, the distribution of stress fields, and the roadway's sectional shape/pattern on zonal disintegration.