Performance prediction of roadheaders using ensemble machine learning techniques

Mechanical excavators are widely used in mining, tunneling and civil engineering projects. There are several types of mechanical excavators, such as a roadheader, tunnel boring machine and impact hammer. This is because these tools can bring productivity to the project quickly, accurately and safely. Among these, roadheaders have some advantages like selective mining, mobility, less over excavation, minimal ground disturbances, elimination of blast vibration, reduced ventilation requirements and initial investment cost. A critical issue in successful roadheader application is the ability to evaluate and predict the machine performance named instantaneous (net) cutting rate. Although there are several prediction methods in the literature, for the prediction of roadheader performance, only a few of them have been developed via artificial neural network techniques. In this study, for this purpose, 333 data sets including uniaxial compressive strength and power on cutting boom, 103 data set including RQD, and 125 data sets including machine weight are accumulated from the literature. This paper focuses on roadheader performance prediction using six different machine learning algorithms and a combination of various machine learning algorithms via ensemble techniques. Algorithms are ZeroR, random forest (RF), Gaussian process, linear regression, logistic regression and multi-layer perceptron (MLP). As a result, MLP and RF give better results than the other algorithms also the best solution achieved was bagging technique on RF and principle component analysis (PCA). The best success rate obtained in this study is 90.2% successful prediction, and it is relatively better than contemporary research.