Enhancing rock and soil hazard monitoring in open-pit mining operations through ultra-short-term wind speed prediction

Abstract

Wind speed exacerbates challenges associated with rock stability, introducing factors such as heightened erosion and the possibility of particle loosening. This increased sensitivity to erosion can result in material displacement, thereby compromising the overall stability of rock layers within the open-pit mining site. Therefore, accurate wind speed predictions are crucial for understanding the impact on rock stability, ensuring the safety and efficiency of open-pit mining operations. While most existing studies on wind speed prediction primarily focus on making overall predictions from the entire wind speed sequence, with limited consideration for the stationarity characteristics of the sequence, This paper introduces a novel approach for effective monitoring and early warning of geotechnical hazards. Our proposed method involves dividing wind speed data into stationary and non-stationary segments using the sliding window average method within the threshold method, validated by the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test. Subsequently, we use temporal convolutional networks (TCN) with dilated causal convolution and long short-term memory to predict the stationary segment of wind speed, effectively improving prediction accuracy for this segment. For the non-stationary segment, we implement complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) to reduce sequence complexity, followed by TCN with an attention mechanism (ATTENTION) to forecast wind speed one step ahead. Finally, we overlay the predictions of these two segments to obtain the final prediction. Our proposed model, tested with data from an open-pit mining area in western China, achieved promising results with an average absolute error of 0.14 knots, mean squared error of 0.05 knots2, and root mean squared error of 0.20 knots. These findings signify a significant advancement in the accuracy of short-term wind speed prediction. This advancement not only enables the rapid assessment and proactive response to imminent risks but also contributes to geotechnical hazard monitoring in open-pit mining operations.