An expert system for underground coal mine planning

In the current market situation, mining companies are faced with the necessity to take actions to improve the efficiency of the mining process. Some of these actions enforce a centralization of activities in the field of deposit economy and planning of mining operations in these companies. In the planning process with such scope the large knowledge of designers is required, which could be additionally supported by a knowledge base, supplied by information and data obtained during the completion of mining works, which also allows for use of the expert knowledge of other organizational units of the mine or the company. The paper presents an original expert system for mining works planning in the underground hard coal mines (MinePlanEx). The aim of the developed system is to support the designers of production planning in hard coal mines within the scope of: equipment selection, mining machinery combining into equipment sets and determining characteristic curves regarding the production results in the planned excavations. Knowledge of the system is represented by the rules selected with the chosen data mining techniques (association rules and classification trees) and obtained from experts. The first part of the paper presents a knowledge base, knowledge acquisition module and inference module which are the main components of the system. The second part contains an example of system operation.