Evaluation of effect of blast design parameters on flyrock using artificial neural networks

Flyrock, the propelled rock fragments beyond a specific limit, can be considered as one of the most crucial and hazardous events in the open pit blasting operations. Involvement of various effective parameters has made the problem so complicated, and the available empirical methods are not proficient to predict the flyrock. To achieve more accurate results, employment of new approaches, such as artificial neural network (ANN) can be very helpful. In this paper, an attempt has been made to apply the ANN method to predict the flyrock in the blasting operations of Sungun copper mine, Iran. Number of ANN models was tried using various permutation and combinations, and it was observed that a model trained with back-propagation algorithm having 9-5-2-1 architecture is the best optimum. Flyrock were also computed from various available empirical models suggested by Lundborg. Statistical modeling has also been done to compare the prediction capability of ANN over other methods. Comparison of the results showed absolute superiority of the ANN modeling over the empirical as well as statistical models. Sensitivity analysis was also performed to identify the most influential inputs on the output results. It was observed that powder factor, hole diameter, stemming and charge per delay are the most effective parameters on the flyrock.     

Evaluation and prediction of flyrock resulting from blasting operations using empirical and computational methods

Mines, quarries and construction sites face environmental impacts, such as flyrock, due to blasting operations. Flyrock may cause damage to structures and injury to human. Therefore, flyrock prediction is required to determine safe blasting zone. In this regard, 232 blasting operations were investigated in five granite quarries, Malaysia. Blasting parameters comprising maximum charge per delay and powder factor were prepared to predict flyrock using empirical and intelligent methods. An empirical graph was proposed to predict flyrock distance for different powder factor values. In addition, using the same datasets, two intelligent systems, namely artificial neural network (ANN) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) were used to predict flyrock. Considering some model performance indices including coefficient of determination (R ²), value account for and root mean squared error and also using simple ranking procedure, the best flyrock prediction models were selected. It was found that the ANFIS model can predict flyrock with higher performance capacity compared to ANN predictive model. R ² values of testing datasets are 0.925 and 0.964 for ANN and ANFIS techniques, respectively, suggesting the superiority of the ANFIS technique in predicting flyrock.     

Combination of neural network and ant colony optimization algorithms for prediction and optimization of flyrock and back-break induced by blasting

Blasting is the process of use of explosives to excavate or remove the rock mass. The main objective of blasting operation is to provide proper rock fragmentation and to avoid undesirable environmental impacts such as ground vibration, flyrock and back-break. Therefore, proper predicting and subsequently optimizing these impacts may reduce damage on facilities and equipment. In this study, an artificial neural network (ANN) was developed to predict flyrock and back-break resulting from blasting. To do this, 97 blasting works in Delkan iron mine, Iran, were investigated and required blasting parameters were collected. The most influential parameters on flyrock and back-break, i.e. burden, spacing, hole length, stemming, and powder factor were considered as model inputs. Results of absolute error (Ea) and root mean square error (RMSE) (0.0137 and 0.063 for Ea and RMSE, respectively) reveal that ANN as a powerful tool can predict flyrock and back-break with high degree of accuracy. In addition, this paper presents a new metaheuristic approximation approach based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) for solving the problem of flyrock and back-break in Delkan iron mine. Considering changeable parameters of the ACO algorithm, blasting pattern parameters were optimized to minimize results of flyrock and back-break. Eventually, implementing ACO algorithm, reductions of 61 and 58 % were observed in flyrock and back-break results, respectively.     

A novel intelligent approach to simulate the blast-induced flyrock based on RFNN combined with PSO

This research focuses to propose a new hybrid approach which combined the recurrent fuzzy neural network (RFNN) with particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to simulate the flyrock distance induced by mine blasting. Here, this combination is abbreviated using RFNN–PSO. To evaluate the acceptability of RFNN–PSO model, adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and non-linear regression models were also used. To achieve the objective of this research, 72 sets of data were collected from Shur river dam region, in Iran. Maximum charge per delay, stemming, burden, and spacing were considered as input parameters in the models. Then, the performance of the RFNN–PSO model was evaluated against ANFIS and non-linear regression models. Correlation coefficient (R2), Nash and Sutcliffe (NS), mean absolute bias error (MABE), and root-mean-squared error (RMSE) were used as comparing statistical indicators for the assessment of the developed approach’s performance. Results show a satisfactory achievement between the actual and predicted flyrcok values by RFNN–PSO with R2, NS, MABE, and RMSE being 0.933, 0.921, 13.86, and 15.79, respectively.     

Hybrid neural modeling for groundwater level prediction

The accurate prediction of groundwater level is important for the efficient use and management of groundwater resources, particularly in sub-humid regions where water surplus in monsoon season and water scarcity in non-monsoon season is a common phenomenon. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a hybrid neural model (ANN-GA) employing an artificial neural network (ANN) model in conjunction with famous optimization strategy called genetic algorithms (GA) for accurate prediction of groundwater levels in the lower Mahanadi river basin of Orissa State, India. Three types of functionally different algorithm-based ANN models (viz. back-propagation (GDX), Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) and Bayesian regularization (BR)) were used to compare the strength of proposed hybrid model in the efficient prediction of groundwater fluctuations. The ANN-GA hybrid modeling was carried out with lead-time of 1 week and study mainly aimed at November and January months of a year. Overall, simulation results suggest that the Bayesian regularization model is the most efficient of the ANN models tested for the study period. However, a strong correlation between the observed and predicted groundwater levels was observed for all the models. The results reveal that the hybrid GA-based ANN algorithm is able to produce better accuracy and performance in medium and high groundwater level predictions compared to conventional ANN techniques including Bayesian regularization model. Furthermore, the study shows that hybrid neural models can offer significant implications for improving groundwater management and water supply planning in semi-arid areas where aquifer information is not available.     

The influence of ARIMA-GARCH parameters in feed forward neural networks prediction

The objective of this article is to find out the influence of the parameters of the ARIMA-GARCH models in the prediction of artificial neural networks (ANN) of the feed forward type, trained with the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm, through Monte Carlo simulations. The paper presents a study of the relationship between ANN performance and ARIMA-GARCH model parameters, i.e. the fact that depending on the stationarity and other parameters of the time series, the ANN structure should be selected differently. Neural networks have been widely used to predict time series and their capacity for dealing with non-linearities is a normally outstanding advantage. However, the values of the parameters of the models of generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity have an influence on ANN prediction performance. The combination of the values of the GARCH parameters with the ARIMA autoregressive terms also implies in ANN performance variation. Combining the parameters of the ARIMA-GARCH models and changing the ANN’s topologies, we used the Theil inequality coefficient to measure the prediction of the feed forward ANN.     

Managing Data Placement in Memory Systems with Multiple Memory Controllers

Modern processors such as Tilera’s Tile64, Intel’s Nehalem, and AMD’s Opteron are migrating memory controllers (MCs) on-chip, while maintaining a large, flat memory address space. This trend to utilize multiple MCs will likely continue and a core or socket will consequently need to route memory requests to the appropriate MC via an inter- or intra-socket interconnect fabric similar to AMD’s HyperTransport^TM, or Intel’s Quick-Path Interconnect^TM. Such systems are therefore subject to non-uniform memory access (NUMA) latencies because of the time spent traveling to remote MCs. Each MC will act as the gateway to a particular region of the physical memory. Data placement will therefore become increasingly critical in minimizing memory access latencies. Increased competition for memory resources will also increase the memory access latency variation in future systems. Proper allocation of workload data to the appropriate MC will be important in decreasing the variation and average latency when servicing memory requests. The allocation strategy will need to be aware of queuing delays, on-chip latencies, and row-buffer hit-rates for each MC. In this paper, we propose dynamic mechanisms that take these factors into account when placing data in appropriate slices of physical memory. We introduce adaptive first-touch page placement, and dynamic page-migration mechanisms to reduce DRAM access delays for multi-MC systems. We also introduce policies that can handle data placement in memory systems that have regions with heterogeneous properties. The proposed policies yield average performance improvements of 6.5% for adaptive first-touch page-placement, and 8.9% for a dynamic page-migration policy for a system with homogeneous DRAM DIMMs. We also show improvements in systems that contain DIMMs with different performance characteristics.     

Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system–based model for elevation–surface area–storage interrelationships

In the developing of an optimal operation schedule for dams and reservoirs, reservoir simulation is one of the critical steps that must be taken into consideration. For reservoirs to have more reliable and flexible optimization models, their simulations must be very accurate. However, a major problem with this simulation is the phenomenon of nonlinearity relationships that exist between some parameters of the reservoir. Some of the conventional methods use a linear approach in solving such problems thereby obtaining not very accurate simulation most especially at extreme values, and this greatly influences the efficiency of the model. One method that has been identified as a possible replacement for ANN and other common regression models currently in use for most analysis involving nonlinear cases in hydrology and water resources–related problems is the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). The use of this method and two other different approaches of the ANN method, namely feedforward back-propagation neural network and radial basis function neural network, were adopted in the current study for the simulation of the relationships that exist between elevation, surface area and storage capacity at Langat reservoir system, Malaysia. Also, another model, auto regression (AR), was developed to compare the analysis of the proposed ANFIS and ANN models. The major revelation from this study is that the use of the proposed ANFIS model would ensure a more accurate simulation than the ANN and the classical AR models. The results obtained showed that the simulations obtained through ANFIS were actually more accurate than those of ANN and AR; it is thus concluded that the use of ANFIS method for simulation of reservoir behavior will give better predictions than the use of any new or existing regression models.     

A Neural Network Approach to Predicting Airspeed in Helicopters

A helicopter’s airspeed and sideslip angle is difficult to measure at speeds below 50 knots. This paper describes the application of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) techniques to the helicopter low air-speed problem. Three ANN methods were applied to the problem: a linear network, a Radial Basis Function (RBF) network, and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), trained using an implementation of the Levenberg–Marquardt (L–M) algorithm. Internally available measurements, such as control positions and body attitudes and rates, were generated using a realistic simulation model of a Lynx helicopter. These measurements formed the inputs to the ANN methods. The MLP was found to be the superior method. Further testing, including a Tagu-chi analysis, indicated the validity of the method. It is concluded that ANN techniques present a promising solution to the helicopter low airspeed problem.     

Making intelligent business decisions by mining the implicit relation from bloggers’ posts

More and more people use blogs to write down their ideas, opinions and individual thoughts. Mining blogs will obtain useful information, which can support business policy and decision-making, especially in analyzing product popularity. In this study, we mine the features of persons as implicit relations between the content of the bloggers’ posts and the bloggers. These kinds of implicit relations, which are also semantic relations, is called the Blogger Role. To mine this semantic relation, Wordnet is used to extract the Blogger Role and the features of Blogger Role. To get an appropriate Blogger Role, we cluster all bloggers’ posts and use the clustering result to revise the Blogger Role obtained by single document analysis. To get more relevant retrieval results, we combine this implicit relation with the classical retrieval model by the Blogger Role-based model. The combination is performed by the explicit model and implicit model. Results of experiments on TREC corpus show that Blogger Role reveals bloggers’ characters and mining Blogger Roles is useful in analyzing the popularity of products.     

Formation conditions of mutual adaptation in human-agent collaborative interaction

When an adaptive agent works with a human user in a collaborative task, in order to enable flexible instructions to be issued by ordinary people, it is believed that a mutual adaptation phenomenon can enable the agent to handle flexible mapping relations between the human user’s instructions and the agent’s actions. To elucidate the conditions required to induce the mutual adaptation phenomenon, we designed an appropriate experimental environment called “WAITER” (Waiter Agent Interactive Training Experimental Restaurant) and conducted two experiments in this environment. The experimental results suggest that the proposed conditions can induce the mutual adaptation phenomenon.     

Protos2CPN: using colored Petri nets for configuring and testing business processes

Protos is a popular tool for business process modelling used in more than 1,500 organizations. It has a built-in Petri-net-based simulation engine which shows key performance indicators for the modelled processes. Reference process models offered for Protos reduce modelling efforts by providing generic solutions which only need to be adapted to individual requirements. However, the user can neither inspect or interact with simulations running in Protos, nor does Protos provide any explicit support for the adaptation of reference models. Hence, we aim at a more open and configurable simulation solution. To realize this we provide two transformations from Protos models to colored Petri nets (CPNs), which can be executed by CPN Tools. The first transformation enables the usage of the extensive simulation and measuring features of CPN Tools for the simulation of Protos models. The second transformation creates colored Petri nets with dedicated features for process configuration. Such configurable process models can be restricted directly within the process model without changing the model’s structure and provide therefore dedicated adaptation features for Protos’ reference process models.     

Discovering colored Petri nets from event logs

Process-aware information systems typically log events (e.g., in transaction logs or audit trails) related to the actual execution of business processes. Analysis of these execution logs may reveal important knowledge that can help organizations to improve the quality of their services. Starting from a process model, which can be discovered by conventional process mining algorithms, we analyze how data attributes influence the choices made in the process based on past process executions using decision mining, also referred to as decision point analysis. In this paper we describe how the resulting model (including the discovered data dependencies) can be represented as a Colored Petri Net (CPN), and how further perspectives, such as the performance and organizational perspective, can be incorporated. We also present a CPN Tools Export plug-in implemented within the ProM framework. Using this plug-in, simulation models in ProM obtained via a combination of various process mining techniques can be exported to CPN Tools. We believe that the combination of automatic discovery of process models using ProM and the simulation capabilities of CPN Tools offers an innovative way to improve business processes. The discovered process model describes reality better than most hand-crafted simulation models. Moreover, the simulation models are constructed in such a way that it is easy to explore various redesigns. A. Rozinat’s research was supported by the IOP program of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. M. Song’s research was supported by the Technology Foundation STW.     

Backbreak prediction in the Chadormalu iron mine using artificial neural network

Backbreak is one of the unfavorable blasting results, which can be defined as the unwanted rock breakage behind the last row of blast holes. Blast pattern parameters, like stemming, burden, delay timing, stiffness ratio (bench height/burden) and rock mass conditions (e.g., geo-mechanical properties and joints), are effective in backbreak intensity. Till date, with the exception of some qualitative guidelines, no specific method has been developed for predicting the phenomenon. In this paper, an effort has been made to apply artificial neural networks (ANNs) for predicting backbreak in the blasting operation of the Chadormalu iron mine (Iran). Number of ANN models with different hidden layers and neurons were tried, and it was found that a network with architecture 10-7-7-1 is the optimum model. A comparative study also approved the superiority of the ANN modeling over the conventional regression analysis. Mean square error (MSE), variance account for (VAF) and coefficient of determination (R ²) between measured and predicted backbreak for the ANN model were calculated and found 89.46 %, 0.714 and 90.02 %, respectively. Also, for the regression model, MSE, VAF and R ² were computed and found 66.93 %, 1.46 and 68.10 %, respectively. Sensitivity analysis was also carried out to find out the influence of each input parameter on backbreak results, and it was revealed that burden is the most influencing parameter on the backbreak, whereas water content is the least effective parameter in this regard.     

A comparison of genetic programming and artificial neural networks in metamodeling of discrete-event simulation models

Genetic programming (GP) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) can be used in the development of surrogate models of complex systems. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of GP and ANNs for metamodeling of discrete-event simulation (DES) models. Three stochastic industrial systems are empirically studied: an automated material handling system (AMHS) in semiconductor manufacturing, an (s,S) inventory model and a serial production line. The results of the study show that GP provides greater accuracy in validation tests, demonstrating a better generalization capability than ANN. However, GP when compared to ANN requires more computation in metamodel development. Even given this increased computational requirement, the results presented indicate that GP is very competitive in metamodeling of DES models.     

Task scheduling with ANN-based temperature prediction in a data center: a simulation-based study

High temperatures within a data center can cause a number of problems, such as increased cooling costs and increased hardware failure rates. To overcome this problem, researchers have shown that workload management, focused on a data center’s thermal properties, effectively reduces temperatures within a data center. In this paper, we propose a method to predict a workload’s thermal effect on a data center, which will be suitable for real-time scenarios. We use machine learning techniques, such as artificial neural networks (ANN) as our prediction methodology. We use real data taken from a data center’s normal operation to conduct our experiments. To reduce the data’s complexity, we introduce a thermal impact matrix to capture the spacial relationship between the data center’s heat sources, such as the compute nodes. Our results show that machine learning techniques can predict the workload’s thermal effects in a timely manner, thus making them well suited for real-time scenarios. Based on the temperature prediction techniques, we developed a thermal-aware workload scheduling algorithm for data centers, which aims to reduce power consumption and temperatures in a data center. A simulation study is carried out to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. Simulation results show that our algorithm can significantly reduce temperatures in data centers by introducing an endurable decline in performance.     

Neural network training based on FPGA with floating point number format and it��s performance

In this paper, two-layered feed forward artificial neural network’s (ANN) training by back propagation and its implementation on FPGA (field programmable gate array) using floating point number format with different bit lengths are remarked based on EX-OR problem. In the study, being suitable with the parallel data-processing specification on ANN’s nature, it is especially ensured to realize ANN training operations parallel over FPGA. On the training, Virtex2vp30 chip of Xilinx FPGA family is used. The network created on FPGA is coded by using VHDL. By comparing the results to available literature, the technique developed here proved to consume less space for the subjected ANN training which has the same structure and bit length, it is shown to have better performance.     

Charting the behavioural state of a person using a backpropagation neural network

This paper describes the application of a backpropagation artificial neural network (ANN) for charting the behavioural state of previously unseen persons. In a simulated theft scenario participants stole or did not steal some money and were interviewed about the location of the money. A video of each interview was presented to an automatic system, which collected vectors containing nonverbal behaviour data. Each vector represented a participant’s nonverbal behaviour related to “deception” or “truth” for a short period of time. These vectors were used for training and testing a backpropagation ANN which was subsequently used for charting the behavioural state of previously unseen participants. Although behaviour related to “deception” or “truth” is charted the same strategy can be used to chart different psychological states over time and can be tuned to particular situations, environments and applications. We thank those who kindly volunteered to participate in the study.     

Using a heuristic approach to derive a grey-box model through an artificial neural network knowledge extraction technique

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are primarily used in academia for their ability to model complex nonlinear systems. Though ANNs have been used to solve practical problems in industry, they are not typically used in nonacademic environments because they are not very well understood, complicated to implement, or have the reputation of being a “black-box” model. Few mathematical models exist that outperform ANNs. If a highly accurate model can be constructed, the knowledge should be used to understand and explain relationships in a system. Output surfaces can be analyzed in order to gain additional knowledge about a system being modeled. This paper presents a systematic approach to derive a “grey-box” model from the knowledge obtained from the ANN. A database for an automobile’s gas mileage performance is used as a case study for the proposed methodology. The results show a greater ability to generalize system behavior than other benchmarked methods.     

Comparison of artificial neural network and combined models in estimating spatial distribution of snow depth and snow water equivalent in Samsami basin of Iran

Snow water equivalent (SWE) is a key parameter in hydrological cycle, and information on regional SWE is required for various hydrological and meteorological applications, as well as for hydropower production and flood forecasting. This study compares the snow depth and SWE estimated by multivariate linear regression (MLR), discriminant function analysis, ordinary kriging, ordinary kriging-multivariate linear regression, ordinary kriging-discriminant function analysis, artificial neural network (ANN) and neural network-genetic algorithm (NNGA) models. The analysis was performed in the 5.2 km² area of Samsami basin, located in the southwest of Iran. Statistical criteria were used to measure the models’ performances. The results indicated that NNGA, ANN and MLR methods were able to predict SWE at the desirable level of accuracy. However, the NNGA model with the highest coefficient of determination (R ² = 0.70, P value < 0.05) and minimum root mean square error (RMSE = 0.202 cm) provided the best results among the other models. The lower SWE values were registered in the east of study area and higher SWE values appeared in the west of study area where altitude was higher.