Lightweight Mashup Middleware for Coal Mine Safety Monitoring and Control Automation

TLDR

Frequent coal mine accidents cause serious casualties and economic losses, making it urgent to improve operational efficiency and overall safety. The study proposes a lightweight mashup middleware for remote monitoring and control automation of underground physical sensor devices. The middleware uses a ZigBee WSN cluster tree with an OSGi-based uniform device access framework, a uniform message space and data distribution model, and a lightweight services mashup approach, supported by visualization technology to create GUIs for underground sensor devices. Four safety monitoring and control automation scenarios were illustrated, and performance measurements showed that the middleware efficiently reduces costs for creating such applications.

Abstract

Recently, the frequent coal mine safety accidents have caused serious casualties and huge economic losses. It is urgent for the global mining industry to increase operational efficiency and improve overall mining safety. This paper proposes a lightweight mashup middleware to achieve remote monitoring and control automation of underground physical sensor devices. First, the cluster tree based on ZigBee Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is deployed in an underground coal mine, and propose an Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi)-based uniform devices access framework. Then, propose a uniform message space and data distribution model, and also, a lightweight services mashup approach is implemented. With the help of visualization technology, the graphical user interface of different underground physical sensor devices could be created, which allows the sensors to combine with other resources easily. Besides, four types of coal mine safety monitoring and control automation scenarios are illustrated, and the performance has also been measured and analyzed. It has been proved that our lightweight mashup middleware can reduce the costs efficiently to create coal mine safety monitoring and control automation applications.