Assessment of effective parameters on dilution using approximate
  reasoning methods in longwall mining method, Iran coal mines
  Approximately more than 90% of all coal production in Iranian underground
mines is derived directly longwall mining method. Out of seam dilution is one
of the essential problems in these mines. Therefore the dilution can impose the
additional cost of mining and milling. As a result, recognition of the
effective parameters on the dilution has a remarkable role in industry. In this
way, this paper has analyzed the influence of 13 parameters (attributed
variables) versus the decision attribute (dilution value), so that using two
approximate reasoning methods, namely Rough Set Theory (RST) and Self
Organizing Neuro- Fuzzy Inference System (SONFIS) the best rules on our
collected data sets has been extracted. The other benefit of later methods is
to predict new unknown cases. So, the reduced sets (reducts) by RST have been
obtained. Therefore the emerged results by utilizing mentioned methods shows
that the high sensitive variables are thickness of layer, length of stope, rate
of advance, number of miners, type of advancing.
