###### Abstract
They can operate on a 24/7 schedule with no idling time as there is no shift change and no breaks required. Manual truck operators can affect 35% of fuel economy whereas ATs can improve fuel usage by 4% with 25-50% reduced idle time [5]. With the use of the AHS, several mining activities have been strengthened due to increasing the efficiency of operations. Such activities require ensuring accurate data collection from which precise information about the state of the mine should be generated in a timely and consistent manner. Consequently, the presence of secure and reliable communications is crucial in making AHS mines safer, productive, and sustainable. The availability and security issues of communication of AHS the mine environment will be discussed below. The availability of communication is an essential service in AHS systems. To the best of our knowledge, the current AHS mines rely entirely on wireless communication [6], which employs standard 802.11 Wi-Fi technology operating in the unlicensed spectrum. In the meantime, technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi) were deemed unfit for industrial communications due to the lure of Industry 4.0, and the flexibility offered by these technologies made Wi-Fi attractive for AHS solutions. Specifically, ATs require seamless connectivity to the network at all times [7]. The geographical challenges and the nature of CPS (AHS) running in the mine make wireless communications the only possible way to keep track and ATs connected. Yet, these wireless technologies lead to a set of challenges--for example, frequency interference, channel utilization, and signal jamming. Furthermore, some special design concerns should be considered, such as signal propagation and dynamic topology as the mine keeps growing, so as to obtain efficient and stable contact. With the integration of OT and IT as in the case of AHS, information sharing becomes more susceptible to disclosure, intrusion, and other cybersecurity issues and attacks. As shown above, AHS can be considered as a CPS system, and thus the former can be integrated with OT using mechanisms that are vulnerable to malicious attacks such as Wi-Fi De-Auth attacks [8], GPS attacks [9], and camera attacks [9; 10]. Thus, safety remains an area of concern as being targeted by traditional cyber-attacks due to the similarities in infrastructure with the conventional IT environment. The authors of [11] emphasize that a lack of security can lead to equipment damage, loss of production, severe injuries, and fatalities, thus greatly endangering safety. In this paper, within the mining environment, we aim to identify and discuss the relation between safety of AHS in the mining environment and both cybersecurity and communication. We argue that addressing cybersecurity issues of AHS can ensure the safety of operations in the mining environment, and that providing reliable communication leads to a better safety. Specifically, we surveyed the literature aiming to study the relation between (1) cybersecurity and safety and (2) communication and safety of AHS in the mining environment. In this paper, the term _safety_ refers to the control of any hazards in order to avoid human injury and mechanical risk. The survey's main objective is to identify the pros and cons of the published work at this point as well as to highlight some open issues for further investigation regarding this field of study. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 summarizes the literature review related to safety accompanied by cybersecurity and communication. In Section 3, future directions and open issues related to cybersecurity, communication, and safety in AHS are discussed. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section 4.