With ever-increasing productivity targets in mining operations, there is a growing interest in mining automation. In future mines, remote-controlled and autonomous haulers will operate underground guided by LiDAR sensors. We envision reusing LiDAR measurements to maintain accurate mine maps that would contribute to both safety and productivity. Extrapolating from a pilot project on reliable wireless communication in Boliden's Kankberg mine, we propose establishing a system-of-systems (SoS) with LIDAR-equipped haulers and existing mapping solutions as constituent systems. SoS requirements engineering inevitably adds a political layer, as independent actors are stakeholders both on the system and SoS levels. We present four SoS scenarios representing different business models, discussing how development and operations could be distributed among Boliden and external stakeholders, e.g., the vehicle suppliers, the hauling company, and the developers of the mapping software. Based on eight key variation points, we compare the four scenarios from both technical and business perspectives. Finally, we validate our findings in a seminar with participants from the relevant stakeholders. We conclude that to determine which scenario is the most promising for Boliden, trade-offs regarding control, costs, risks, and innovation must be carefully evaluated.
As the mining operations proceed, shafts and drifts are inevitably affected in position (inclination, rotation, lateral movements, and curves) and form (compression and deformation). There are three main causes of cave-ins in underground mines. First, hasty mining operations might fail to secure walls and ceilings of shafts and drifts. Second, excessive excavation might lead to cracks in floors and walls, thus weakening the entire structure. Examples include insufficient vertical spacing between crosscuts and too rectangular crosscuts causing stress concentration in corners. Third, gradual sinking of land can cause cave-ins @cite_20 , i.e., subsidence (the downward motion of a surface). As illustrated in Fig. , mining operations induce subsidence of the Earth's surface. While mining-induced subsidence is rather predictable in magnitude and extent, monitoring the progress is fundamental to mining safety. In Kankberg, however, the mountain stresses caused by drilling and blasting activities dominate any subsidence.
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Sea minefields obstructing naval missions have to be breached with minimum eort and acceptable risk. With the advent of autonomous mapping, it is feasible to have high quality information of obstructing sea minefields and their environment before moving into them. The challenge remains to use this knowledge optimally to minimise risk, time and eort in crossing the sea minefield. To achieve this, two interlinked processes are required, consisting of finding the shortest route with acceptable risk or route with minimum risk through the sea minefield, and if no route of acceptable risk exists, removing the optimum combination of sea mines to create a route of acceptable risk. This paper describes the use of Dijkstra’s Algorithm and a genetic algorithm to achieve practical strategies and a method in which two optimisation techniques interact to provide a safe route considering the risk of both the sea mine and the environment and making it applicable to sea mine avoidance. This methodology may readily be applied to general ship routing in risk areas and may be expanded to routing through any area where no known routes exist. Improvements in underground wireless tracking technology are critical for improved safety and productivity in underground mines. While the recent focus on technology development has been for underground coal mines, improvements are required for block caving operations which have very different characteristics from coal mines. Block caving is characterized by a large number of draw points from which the mineral ore is extracted from under the ore body, and efficient and safe operation of such a mine requires careful monitoring and control of the distribution of ore extraction from the draw points. In this paper a new algorithm is presented for accurately tracking mine vehicles in an underground mine with a low density of reference nodes. A system is described that was installed at an operation mine, and results from a year long trial are presented. The results showed that the system is capable of accurately tracking ore extraction in an operational mine, and of reliable operation over an extended period of time. Given a directed graph, the problem of blackhole mining is to identify groups of nodes, called blackhole patterns, in a way such that the average in-weight of this group is significantly larger than the average out-weight of the same group. The problem of finding volcano patterns is a dual problem of mining blackhole patterns. Therefore, we focus on discovering the blackhole patterns. Indeed, in this article, we develop a generalized blackhole mining framework. Specifically, we first design two pruning schemes for reducing the computational cost by reducing both the number of candidate patterns and the average computation cost for each candidate pattern. The first pruning scheme is to exploit the concept of combination dominance to reduce the exponential growth search space. Based on this pruning approach, we develop the gBlackhole algorithm. Instead, the second pruning scheme is an approximate approach, named approxBlackhole, which can strike a balance between the efficiency and the completeness of blackhole mining. Finally, experimental results on real-world data show that the performance of approxBlackhole can be several orders of magnitude faster than gBlackhole, and both of them have huge computational advantages over the brute-force approach. Also, we show that the blackhole mining algorithm can be used to capture some suspicious financial fraud patterns. Abstract The use of energy-minimizing curves, known as “snakes,” to extract features of interest in images has been introduced by Kass, Witkin & Terzopoulos ( Int. J. Comput. Vision 1, 1987, 321–331). We present a model of deformation which solves some of the problems encountered with the original method. The external forces that push the curve to the edges are modified to give more stable results. The original snake, when it is not close enough to contours, is not attracted by them and straightens to a line. Our model makes the curve behave like a balloon which is inflated by an additional force. The initial curve need no longer be close to the solution to converge. The curve passes over weak edges and is stopped only if the edge is strong. We give examples of extracting a ventricle in medical images. We have also made a first step toward 3D object reconstruction, by tracking the extracted contour on a series of successive cross sections.