Simulation study of coal mine safety investment based on system dynamics

To generate dynamic planning for coal mine safety investment, this study applies system dynamics to decision-making, classifying safety investments by accident type. It validates the relationship between safety investments and accident cost, by structurally analyzing the causality between safety investments and their influence factors. Our simulation model, based on Vensim software, conducts simulation analysis on a series of actual data from a coalmine in Shanxi Province. Our results indicate a lag phase in safety investments, and that increasing pre-phase safety investment reduces accident costs. We found that a 24% increase in initial safety investment could help reach the target accident costs level 14 months earlier. Our simulation test included nine kinds of variation trends of accident costs brought by different investment ratios on accident prevention. We found an optimized ratio of accident prevention investments allowing a mine to reach accident cost goals 4 months earlier, without changing its total investment.