The article is dedicated to the crucial problem of occupational safety for personnel at work and the hazardous operation of coalmines due to gas explosions. Natural, technogenic, natural & technogenic, as well as geomechanic factors causing methane accumulation in excavations and following emergency explosions have been described. These factors are classified as so-called difficult-to-control as they cannot be under control during workflows and cannot be managed by means and methods of mining production. The task of elaborating on methods of their identification has been set as the determination of signs (parameters) of emergencies serving as a source of information. The practical result of identification is the prevention of a combination of conditions and circumstances under which an accident occurs, considering the interaction with factors under control. The information about the signs of emergency in mines is inherently weak and complex. Due to the nature of physical phenomena always accompanied by noise, the numerical values of signs of emergency are random. Therefore, the description and identification of abrupt changes in difficult-to-control factors considered emergency have been performed by using entropy-probabilistic concepts and characteristics. It has been shown that the information methods of identification are based on well-known principles of the general theory of informational optimization of systems aimed at minimizing the uncertainty of solving the identification problem. The comparative analysis of the existing theoretical methods to find the optimal identification strategy has shown that with the reduction of the volume of signs specific for an emergency or their low information content as well due to noise, D-information strategies are the only possible ones. One of such strategies is based on the Shannon-Fano statistical code, whereas the other is based on the method of informational dichotomy. Testing these strategies has demonstrated their technical applicability.
Read full abstract