Simulation Models for Assessing the Risk of Underground Accidents Occurrence in the Coal Mines

Abstract

The article is related to the safety issues of the coal mines considering not only the standard conditions of their operation, but also the influence of external effects, personnel errors during mining operations and operation of controls and automation. The relationship between the causes of accidents and sources of hazards is shown. The analysis of mine safety research methods was carried out, which allow to identify the most dangerous causes and conditions of the underground accidents to one degree or another. It is shown that at the mining sites, despite the extremely small, but non-zero probability, accidents still occur due to the probability densities of rare dangerous situations leading to severe consequences. The expediency of logical-probabilistic methods for modeling scenarios of possible accidents, which are interpreted by the cause-and-effect diagrams of the occurrence of a chain of incidents, is asserted. Based on the normalization of the frequencies of occurrence of emergency situations in coal mining, a rationale is given for the transition from the weights of various initiating conditions to their contributions to emergency situations. Simulation models of decision-making for operational substantive analysis of emergency situations were developed, including an assessment of the weights and contributions of mining and geological, mining and technical factors, and personnel errors to the risk of methane explosion occurrence, fires and gasification of workings in case of violations in the degassing systems. It is shown that the existing hazards must be able to measure, i.e. have numerical scales. These hazardrs can be assessed based on the construction of hazard trees. Using them, as well as assessments of emergency changes in the state of the technosphere of coal mines, which are based on the analysis of cause-and-effect relationships of hazard sources, simulation models of the hazard of underground accidents were formed and implemented. These models can be considered as functional models of any emergency situation, allowing to obtain analytical estimates of variations in emergency situations by their weights and contributions to the hazard of emergency situations.