Analysis of mine ventilation systems using operations research methods

A mine ventilation system consists of interconnected airways, work places and ventilation control devices. It can be represented as a network, in which the airways and work places are depicted as lines and the connection points of these lines as nodes. This representation permits application of Operations Research methods in analysis and design of mine ventilation systems. This paper presents two Operations Research models for optimization of ventilation control device locations and sizes in two different mine ventilation systems: a controlled flow ventilation system, for which a mixed integer programming model is introduced, and a semi-controlled flow ventilation system, which is formulated as a nonlinear, nonconvex model. Two hypothetical examples are used to demonstrate the applicability of the models.