UNDERGROUND COAL MINE TRACKING AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEM RELIABILITY AND AVAILABILITY METHODOLOGY

摘要

Every underground coal mine in the United States must deploy and operate a wireless communication and tracking system. This paper addresses the reliability and availability of an installed tracking system and the communications infrastructure that supports it. A particular interest is the requirements for the systems to operate continuously without failure after a mine disaster for 96 hours, and the requirements in the MINER Act for the tracking systems to be "calculated to be serviceable" and the communications systems "redundancy". These requirements imply a certain reliability and availability. This paper describes a quantitative way to assess these systems requirements, using the tools that are available and commonly used by the Reliability, Maintainability, & Availability community.