Developing an Advanced Soft Computational Model for Estimating Blast-Induced Ground Vibration in Nui Beo Open-pit Coal Mine (Vietnam) Using Artificial Neural Network

The principal object of this study is blast-induced ground vibration (PPV), which is one of the dangerous side effects of blasting operations in an open-pit mine. In this study, nine artificial neural networks (ANN) models were developed to predict blast-induced PPV in Nui Beo open-pit coal mine, Vietnam. Multiple linear regression and the United States Bureau of Mines (USBM) empirical techniques are also conducted to compare with nine developed ANN models. 136 blasting operations were recorded in many years used for this study with 85% of the whole datasets (116 blasting events) was used for training and the rest 15% of the datasets (20 blasting events) for testing. Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Determination Coefficient (R2), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) are used to compare and evaluate the performance of the models. The results revealed that ANN technique is more superior to other techniques for estimating blast-induced PPV. Of the nine developed ANN models, the ANN 7-10-8-5-1 model with three hidden layers (ten neurons in the first hidden layer, eight neurons in the second layers, and five neurons in the third hidden layer) provides the most outstanding performance with an RMSE of 1.061, R2 of 0.980, and MAE of 0.717 on testing datasets. Based on the obtained results, ANN technique should be applied in preliminary engineering for estimating blast-induced PPV in open-pit mine.