Advanced Mine Monitoring Control, Operation and Safety System for Small Scale Mines

Challenge the practice is addressing: The current challenge in mining sector is that companies use many different systems, platforms and technologies, and it is difficult to integrate a new technology into such a diverse system. In addition, sometimes SMEs find it difficult to commit to technological implementations. Small to medium scale enterprises (SME) are competing with global companies that can lower their production costs by introducing larger machineries into operation. Real-Time-Mining aims to enhance information flow along SMEs’ planning and production activities and introduces a new Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to enhance SMEs’ competitiveness in the mining sector. The first part of the report presents the necessity of introducing a middleware to allow cross-manufacturer integration of mining technology into superordinate systems in an economical manner. The second part presents the technical realisation of physical and logical data transmission and gives a brief introduction to the technical background of SCADA systems.

Concrete practice to achieve the expected goal: To tackle the challenges SMEs are confronted with, Real-Time-Mining (and especially TU Bergakademie Freiberg) introduces a method for the alignment of data acquisition, data transmission and data processing in mining. The Real-Time-Mining’s solution was to have data platform independently integrated into one holistic SCADA system. The tool chosen to solve the issue was Middleware OPC Unified Architecture (communication architecture) which is a software architecture that connects applications and technologies. TU Bergarkadmie Freiberg's vision is to provide a Plug and Produce capability for the integration of mining devices and machineries into superordinate data management systems.

Expected impact/goal of the practice: The key issue for the digitalisation development in mining is said to be the lack of uniformly applied standards and software architectures across industrial applications and interactive solutions. Real-Time-Mining provides a technical solution to improve SMEs information flow and furthermore their competitiveness in the mining sector.

Who is the target user group of the practice/intervention or implementing the practice/intervention? Industry, SMEs.