Reliability Study for Communication System: A Case Study of an Underground Mine

After summarizing and evaluating works on system reliability, various models and results for predicting and evaluating system reliability have been introduced. However, we have not seen a study conducted to assess the reliability of communication systems in an underground mine. Underground mining operations are normally dependent on communication system reliability. The main purpose of this work is to study the failure of a theoretical underground mine communication system, propose a method to improve its reliability, and predict the results of the suggested method using system dynamic modeling. This study contributes to improving the reliability of communication systems in underground mines. In the case of a single nonredundant system, three options were implemented: doubling corrective maintenance, increasing preventative maintenance by 50%, and combining both measures. These three options were modeled by combining Markov modelling with system dynamic modelling methodology and were confirmed by experiments and simulation results. This combination of modelling constitutes the novelty of this study. In this paper, actual system component failure data was used for simulation for the single nonredundant system, after doubling corrective maintenance, increasing preventative maintenance by 50%, and combining in the case of implementing simultaneously both maintenance changes, but not for developing single and dual standby system models. Therefore, these models should be suitable for practical use, as they are based on actual working systems. Modelling confirmed that placing a communication system in each shaft of the theoretical underground mine increases the reliability of the communication system. The degree of availability of the communication system with single standby device shows the result of 62.38% while the communication system with two standby devices and three parallel communication systems’ availability rating shows a result of 85.18%.