## 1 Introduction  
As the main coal flow transportation equipment, the belt conveyor occupies an important position in the mine transportation system [1, 2]. There are more than 2.5 million belt conveyors in operation in the world, and the energy consumption problem caused by belt conveyors is becoming more and more prominent [3, 4]. The driving motor of a belt conveyor is often designed with maximum operating power, and the loading rate of transportation materials often runs below the design capacity [5], which will cause a waste of energy. With the rapid development of intelligent mining equipment in mines, the output of coal mining enterprises has been greatly improved, and higher requirements have been put forward for the transmission distance, overall power, stability and reliability, and energy saving of belt conveyors [5, 6, 7]. The traditional belt conveyor mostly adopts the centralized drive structure of a single motor. This belt conveyor's centralized drive structure requires high driving power to increase the conveying distance, resulting in higher power for a single motor, a larger volume, and more installation space [8, 9]. Therefore, the long-distance belt conveyor is gradually evolving in the direction of the coordinated drive of multiple motors. The multi-motor coordinated drive of the belt conveyor needs to address two problems. On the one hand, the synchronous speed between the motors is consistent [10]. At present, there are many synchronous control schemes that can better solve the problem of multi-motor synchronous speed, such as master-slave, coupling, virtual axis, and other different control structures [11, 12, 13, 14, 15]. On the other hand, the power allocation problem between multiple motors needs to be considered. Currently, the motor power distribution scheme applied to belt conveyors is mainly proportional distribution [16, 17]. This distribution method is not adjusted according to different carrying conditions, which is not conducive to reducing the energy loss of the belt conveyor. With the continuous advancement of modern control theory, scholars have increasingly introduced advanced control algorithms to optimize the power distribution ratio based on the fixed power distribution of existing belt conveyors. In [18], the authors studied a multi-motor drive system, with inputs including conveyor belt speed error, current deviation, and the rate of change of current deviation. The reference current was chosen as the median current among the three motors. A dual fuzzy controller was established to reduce the number of fuzzy control rules, and an intelligent integration component was further introduced to minimize system steady-state error and improve control accuracy. In [19], the authors employed a fuzzy neural network to achieve power balance control, utilizing an improved backpropagation neural network to reduce the number of rules in traditional networks. Fuzzy operations were implemented by adjusting neural network weights and training network parameters. Compared to traditional fuzzy neural networks, this method improved response speed, and relative to pure fuzzy control, it reduced system overshoot and steady-state error. To enhance the operational efficiency of multiple motors in belt conveyors, this study introduces a configuration featuring a belt conveyor driven by distributed permanent magnet direct drive motors beneath the conveyor belt. Considering the distributed motor drive characteristics of the belt conveyor, a multi-motor power distribution balance strategy is proposed to achieve the highest motor operation efficiency. Firstly, a fuzzy regulator is designed to continuously monitor the loading rate of transported materials and ascertain the quantity of active motors. Secondly, the neural network controller is designed to optimize the distribution position of each running motor. Finally, the motor adjustment curve is designed.