MinerFinder: a GAE-LSTM method for predicting location of miners in underground mines

Abhay Goyal, Sanjay Madria, Samuel Frimpong

Abstract: Recent reports by the Mine Safety and Health Administration suggest that several injuries and fatalities could be attributed to the inability to accurately locate miners in case of disasters. Since underground mines have a complicated geometrical landscape and technological constraints such as no GPS information available, it is difficult to predict the location of a miner and hence may cause delays and inefficiencies in rescue operations during a disaster. A significant amount of research has been done to capture complex spatio-temporal relationships of movement of the nodes/people/things with time, spatial and temporal features to separately extract these relationships for location prediction. Although Markov Chains (MC) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based methods have been used to predict locations, not all of them specifically mention the spatial locations, their connections and the aggregation techniques which would allow for the actual representations of the trajectory of miners. Addressing these concerns, we develop a first-of-its-kind end-to-end system entitled MinerFinder to predict the future location of the miners by incorporating Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) for trajectory information with Graph Autoencoder (GAE) for spatial environmental information representing the node connectivity. In addition, our approach will combine the miners' previous trajectories and daily repetitive patterns enhancing the prediction robustness. We evaluated MinerFinder over synthetic dataset to analyze the structure and location topology of an underground mine compared with foreground locations. Our model outperforms state of the art models and achieves an AP score ranging from (0.62 - 0.68) and Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) ranging from (0.63--0.68) with increasing percentage of prominent locations (most visited) to 50%.