A cyber-physical system approach for enabling ventilation on-demand in an underground mining site

Creating awareness on the gas concentration along with the timely provision of fresh air is of major importance for preserving the normal operating condition of mining equipment as well as for the well-being of people working underground. However, the deployment and application of a data acquisition and control system in underground sites remain challenging. In order to safeguard the mining personnel, a cyber-physical system for monitoring the concentration of gases enabling adaptive control of the ventilation system is discussed in this study. Long-range communication modules are used to collect field data that are processed to enable awareness over underground conditions. A ventilation on-demand module and an energy consumption evaluation component enable dynamic control of the ventilation system based on the measured gases concentration. A prototype implementation has been tested on a simulated use case with real-world sensor data.