Angelina Anani

The University of Arizona | UA

Assessing and making decisions in underground mines is crucial and is difficult due to the harsh environment and the limitation of accessibility. Monitoring plays an important role in assessing ground conditions to ensure safety and efficiency. Through consistent monitoring, a safe interoperable underground mine can be achieved, but to ensure coher...

Inefficiencies in mine equipment maintenance processes result in high operation costs and reduce mine sustainability. However, current methods for process optimization are limited due to a lack of access to structured data. This research aims to test the hypothesis that process mining techniques can be used to optimize workflow for mine equipment m...

This research aims to test the hypothesis that the low retention rate of women in the mining industry is caused by workplace culture and policies established due to gender segregation. A quasi-experiment is developed to determine the cause-and-effect relationship between gender segregation-inspired culture and the retention of women. The experiment...

Virtual reality (VR) is an advancing technology that is used in many domains, from training to immersive analytics. However, its application in the mining industry is limited, with no known systematic framework. We present a critical review of (1) VR research and developed technologies in mining and (2) current areas of application and their limita...

Current machine learning models used for roof fall hazard prediction are mounted on expensive sensors, computationally expensive, or lack the robustness for accurate prediction in the underground mining environment. This research aims to provide a design methodology for a robust, low-cost, deep learning-based algorithm for underground mine roof fal...

Current deep learning models used for roof fall hazards prediction are computationally expensive and lack the robustness for accurate prediction in the underground mining environment. This research aims to develop a robust, low-cost, deep learning-based algorithm for underground mine roof fall hazard prediction. A data sampling plan is developed to...

Virtual reality (VR) is an advancing technology that is used in many domains, from training to immersive analytics. However, its application in the mining industry is limited, with no known systematic framework. We present a critical review of (1) VR research and developed technologies in mining, and (2) current areas of application and their limit...

This research aims to test the hypothesis that the low retention rate of women in the mining industry is caused by workplace culture and policies established due to gender segregation. A quasi-experiment is developed to determine the cause-and-effect relationship between gender segregation-inspired culture and the retention of women. The experiment...

The new caving megaprojects that are planned to go into production in the next decade have scheduled horizontal developments at very high rates, which are difficult to achieve. Research has been conducted that seeks to model the construction times for underground developments to determine the feasibility of achieving the planned rates. However, the...

Current technologies have made the transition from surface mining to underground mining feasible and economically viable. The transition is challenging, especially for deposits that require exploitation with both methods. The existing research addresses a more complex transition mine planning problem, which integrates production scheduling with tra...

This paper reviews literature on data-driven approaches for characterizing rock mass and ground conditions in tunnels. There have been significant advances in the use of both unsupervised and supervised machine learning (ML) methods to predict the ground condition or rock mass class ahead of tunnel boring machines (TBMs). This study evaluates the l...

Optimization of panels, haulage fleet, and waiting area involves deterministic and low-fidelity methods and experiential knowledge. The process is challenging because coal recovery and operational capabilities must be considered in the solution. The approach in this manuscript comprises the development of an integrated stochastic simulation model o...

Current technological advancement has increased the exploitation of deeper ore bodies using underground methods. In certain cases, the mineral deposit starts near the surface and continues deep within the earth's crust. Such deposits are best mined with both underground and surface methods. Two main techniques are used to determine the optimal tran...

SYNOPSIS Cave mining is an underground mass mining technique. The largest projects, which are known as 'super caves', produce hundreds of thousands of tons of ore per day, which involves large footprints with considerable column height, and have a life of mine of over 20-40 years. These operations are typically located deep, under high stresses and...

Optimizing level intervals is one of the main issues in underground mining operations with steeply-dipping deposits. Specifically, it has a direct effect on the economy, as well as, the technical decisions of a mining project. Any deviation of the level intervals from the optimal values either increases the development costs or cause problems durin...

Accounting for changing duty cycles in equipment matching maximizes equipment utilization and productivity. The objective of this study is to investigate if the optimal number of shuttle cars for a particular panel width is optimal in different segments of the panel. In this study, discrete event simulation (DES) is used to determine the optimal nu...

Increasing the depth of mining operations becomes fundamental due to the depletion of the shallower high-grade orebodies. Besides, technological developments make deep mining operations feasible. Block and panel caving are classified into large-scale production methods applicable to deep low-grade massive deposits. When mining goes deeper, evaluati...

The need to increase productivity has led to innovations in highly mechanized equipment such as the continuous miner (CM). However, often times the CM is underutilized, resulting in loss of productivity and increased operating cost. The objective of this study is to apply a simulation tool to evaluate if optimizing support systems, such as cut-out...

Current innovations and technological advances in underground coal mines have contributed significantly towards sustainable extraction and productivity. However, equipment such as the continuous miner is highly underutilized due to spatial restriction and sub-optimal practices. Support systems such as the cutout distance and panel dimensions can be...

Different complexities force mining companies to find efficient ways to respond to demand challenges and ensure long-term sustainability. It explains, in part, the increase in the use of prescriptive analytics to optimize physical-asset life-cycle costs and decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Mining, being an asset-intensive industry, provides...

A key design aspect of room-and-pillar coal mines is the panel width (or number of entries in a panel), which affects unit mining costs and productivity. Traditional mine design approaches do not facilitate optimisation of unit mining costs and productivity as a function of the panel width. Discrete event simulation can be used to facilitate optima...

This paper presents an approach for handling correlated input variables in discrete event simulation (DES) modelling of truck–shovel systems using commercial DES software and uses a case study to investigate the effect of ignoring correlation between input variables. Multivariate random vectors, instead of independent probability distributions, are...

The goal of hot mix asphalt (HMA) design is optimal material blending to meet Superpave specifications. HMA cost minimization has being modeled as linear programing (LP) (Awuah-Offei et al 2011) and mixed integer LP problems (Brown et al, 2012) and solved with commercial software such as LINDO and CPLEX. Often these software, which are designed to...

The need to optimize surface mining operations has led to the use of discrete event simulation (DES) modeling of truck-shovel systems. Often, these models assume truck cycle times are independent and identically distributed (iid) random variables, although, with significant bunching on the haul routes, this may not be valid. The objective of this p...