Institute of Computer Science III
University of Bonn
Databases * Information Systems * Software Engineering * Pattern Recognition * Image Processing * Artificial Intelligence * Robotics


Knowledge-enhanced CO-monitoring in Coal Mines

Wolfram Burgard, Armin B. Cremers, Dieter Fox, Martin Heidelbach, Angelica M. Kappel and Stefan Lüttringhaus-Kappel

in Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Industrial & Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems, ACROS Fukuoka, June 4-7, 1996

Detection of underground fires is an important security task in hard-coal mining.Automated fire detection systems are usually based on the monitoring of carbon monoxide (CO). Systems using conventional technology based on threshold and tendency observations, however, generate a large number of false alarms. We show how CO-concentrations can be forecast by appropriate models of the physical and chemical processes. We furthermore describe a rule-based specification system utilizing forecasting for CO-monitoring. The improvement of this approach over the conventional is threefold. First, the number of false alarms is reduced by 50%, at least. Simultaneously, the thresholds for warnings and alarms can be reduced so that, second, the detection of real fires becomes both quicker and more reliable. Third, heuristic rules for fire detection andsuppression of false alarms as well as the control of the forecasting can be described in a declarative way. While our system is still in a prototypic stage, the three major German hard-coal mining companies decided to use our approach in their CO-monitoring systems.

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