Abstract: In coal mine drainage system, the most common method to determine pump start or stop is according to several key factors or experience to directly determine. The method lacks theoretical basis and often needs to modify the arrangement according to site conditions. For the problem, the paper presented a pump control method based on BP neural network, which selects four key parameters including water level, water inflow, time period and cumulative running time to establish a network, and gets a stable network model through continuously adjusting and optimizing the network. The model is then used to determine start and stop time of pump, so as to achieve reasonable arrangement of multiple pumps. Matlab simulation results showed that it is reasonable and effective to control pump system by BP neural network, and the method has a positive significance to achieve safe production and energy saving of coal mine.