Industry 4.0 is knocking on South African miners’ doors, with the introduction of a digital mine increasingly becoming seemingly important for their survival and success. In order for mines to remain competitive, digital innovations will be needed in the future to increase productivity. This paper looks at an artificial intelligent technique in order to assist in the control of shuttle vehicles in the coal mining industry. Since the bord and pillar mining technique is used, shuttle car movements are based on queuing, shortest paths and path constraints. A graphical user interface (GUI) was designed in order to assist mining operators. The algorithms used in this optimization of these cars are Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm, K-shortest path algorithm and discrete event simulation. In order to test this application, simulations and test results were carried out using Matlab.
Constraint dependent, shortest path algorithms for real time vehicles movement in the coal mining industry towards Industry 4.0
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