Review of smoothing methods for enhancement of noisy data from heavy-duty LHD mining machines

Abstract

Appropriate analysis of data measured on heavy-duty mining machines is essential for processes monitoring, management and optimization. Some particular classes of machines, for example LHD (load-haul-dump) machines, hauling trucks, drilling/bolting machines etc. are characterized with cyclicity of operations. In those cases, identification of cycles and their segments or in other words – simply data segmentation is a key to evaluate their performance, which may be very useful from the management point of view, for example leading to introducing optimization to the process. However, in many cases such raw signals are contaminated with various artifacts, and in general are expected to be very noisy, which makes the segmentation task very difficult or even impossible. To deal with that problem, there is a need for efficient smoothing methods that will allow to retain informative trends in the signals while disregarding noises and other undesired non-deterministic components. In this paper authors present a review of various approaches to diagnostic data smoothing. Described methods can be used in a fast and efficient way, effectively cleaning the signals while preserving informative deterministic behaviour, that is a crucial to precise segmentation and other approaches to industrial data analysis.