Assessment of effective parameters on dilution using approximate reasoning methods in longwall mining method, Iran coal mines

Approximately more than 90% of all coal production in Iranian underground mines is derived directly longwallmining method. Out – of – seam dilution (namely 20–30%) is one of the essential problems in these mines.Therefore the dilution can impose the additional cost of mining and milling. As a result, recognition of the effectiveparameters on the dilution has a remarkable role in industry. In this way, this paper has analyzed the influence of 13parameters (attributed variables) versus the decision attribute (dilution value), so that using two approximatereasoning methods, namely Rough Set Theory (RST) and Self Organizing Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System(SONFIS) the best rules on our collected data sets has been extracted. The other benefit of later methods is topredict new unknown cases. So, the reduced sets (reducts) by RST have been obtained. Therefore the emergedresults by utilizing mentioned methods shows that the high sensitive variables are “thickness of layer, length ofstope, rate of advance, number of miners, type of advancing”.198