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The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B5. Beijing 2008 
preparation, exaltation and related self-running equipments, as 
well as the automation of monitoring and controlling of the 
ventilation, gas, water disaster, and staff (Tan Dejian, 2006). 
Put in a simple way, the industrial automation can be 
categorized into two parts. One part is automation of mining 
equipments, and another part is automation of monitoring and 
controlling equipments. Based on the industrial ethemet, all the 
automatic equipments and monitoring facilities are shown in the 
scheduling center on a huge screen, and all underground 
information are transmitted to the database by the net for 
decision-making. 
VRLane can embody the real-time situation underground and 
implement the monitoring data query. Fig. 5 shows the principle 
of monitoring data integration. 
Figure 5. Monitoring data integration 
Monitoring data are stored in SQLServer database. The base 
information of all kinds of ventilation, gas and 
electromechanical equipments are store in many database tables. 
Table’s structures with the detailed illustration are established 
according to database analysis and design. Taken gas 
monitoring data as an example, real-time data from gas sensors 
are written into database in a specified time interval, which 
include gas sensor’s parameter and related functionary. When 
user selects the virtual gas sensor in the laneway, the system 
marches the 3D model name with the right equipment ID and 
finds the corresponding parameters by its keyword in the 
database. The search results will return to system interface and 
give a voice warning. 
5. SYSTEM APPLICATION 
VRLane program has been applied into Dongtan Mine, 
Yankuang Mining Group, Shandong Province. The main object 
is to demonstrate the underground mine environment vividly 
and provide a useful and simple system of safety information 
management. Fig. 6 shows virtual scene built from a 2D mining 
engineering map automatically. A high performance computer 
was used for navigating around the simulation environment, and 
complicated situation will be displayed on the large projection 
screen in the mine control center room. The system, with 
advantages of cheap, dynamic, easy to maintenance, provides a 
useful tool for safety production management in coal mine. 
Г!" ШЖ 
(a) Simulation of coal shearer and hydraulic support 
(b) A virtual scene of the mine and mine cars 
Figure 6. A virtual scene of underground laneway. 
6. CONCLUSIONS 
VRLane, a virtual VR program for mine safety management, 
explored a new solution to apply the visualization technologies 
into practice mining. To sum it up, VRLane has five unique 
features as follows: 
1) VRLane provides the mixed modeling method. It can 
automatically build and update various underground 3D models 
such as strata, laneways and equipments. Also, it can import the 
3DMax and other format’s model. 
2) VRLane blends the functions of 2DGIS and 3D visualization 
closely. Due to restriction of mine design and mine engineering, 
most of mining drawings are finished by AutoCAD or 2DGIS. 
We present a 2D & 3D integrated GIS platform to extend the 
application field of VR technologies. 
3) VRLane can describe the ground and underground 
environment realistically and thoroughly. It can get the real 
time monitoring information from virtual environment. It is a 
good tool for supervisor to control the various underground 
monitoring data.