Prioritization of hazards in mechanized longwall coal mining: a case study of Tabas Coal Mine

Underground coal mining has always known as one of the most hazardous mining activities. The risk of possible incidents in these mines may cause the irreparable damages such as death or personal injury, damage and loss of equipment or interrupting the production process of mines. For this reason, the risk analysis has a very important role in underground coal mines. Hazards identification is the first step of a risk analysis process. In this research by using a combination of library efficiency and expert judgment, the most important hazards in lonwall coal mining have been identified. The prioritization of identified hazards is done by using fuzzy TOPSIS. For this aim the likelihood, severity and reaction was considering as a main criteria and vulnerability and detection as the sub criteria. The results show that the severity and reaction by weight of 0.416 and 0.293 respectively has the highest and lowest impact on the hazard ranking. The proposed model was used in Tabas longwall coal mine. Results show that the roof fall at the panel face and gates by similarity index of 0.832 and 0.823 is the most important known hazards. Also, the subsidence and flooding by similarity index of 0.492 and 0.482 has the minimum level of similarity index. To determine the sensitivity of the achieved ranking, a sensitivity analysis was conducted. The results show that the proposed model has no sensitivity to the weight of decision criteria.