A Fuzzy AHP Approach to Select the Proper Roadheader in Tabas Coal Mine Project of Iran İran Tabas Kömür Madeni Projesinde Uygun Tünel Açma Makinasi Seçimi için Bulanik AHP Yaklaşimi

Machinery equipment selection, particularly mechanical excavators in mechanized mining operations, is one of the most important issues through a mine project planning and design, and has a remarkable effect on speed and cost of excavating operation. Therefore, it is an essential matter and needs to be concerned and managed appropriately. Alike other mechanized projects, mechanized coal mining is very machinery-intensive so that appropriate equipment selection plays a key role in project’s success and productivity. In this respect, it is crucial to consider the basic parameters such as geological and geotechnical properties of ore deposit, its surrounding strata, economic and technical parameters, etc through the selection process; hence, choosing the major equipment and mechanical miners such as roadheaders in mechanized coal mining is a multi-criteria decision making problem. A multi-criteria decision making method is used to rank available roadheaders based on a set of criteria, ultimately leading to suggest the high-ranked one as the best option.This paper presents an evaluation model based on Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy AHP) approach to select the proper roadheading machine in Tabas coal mine project; the largest and the only fully mechanized coal mine in Iran. This method assists mine designers and decision makers in the process of roadheader selection under fuzzy environment where the vagueness and uncertainty are taken into account with linguistic variable parameterized by triangular fuzzy numbers. The broad issue includes three possible roadheading machines and five criteria to evaluate them. The suggested method applied to the mine and the most appropriate roadheader, among three candidate roadheaders, has been ranked and selected as DOSCO MD1100 roadheader with the highest weight of 0.435. The weights of other options namely KOPEYSK KP21 and WIRTH T2.11 found as 0.323 and 0.242, respectively.

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