Digitisation of the life cycle of mining processes – preliminary work on WP2

The Mine.io project demonstrates the vision of the future digital mine. The project includes many different technologies that are being developed and tested at seven Pilot Sites. WP2 details the holistic approach to digitising the mining sector and how existing technologies can be used for this purpose. It must therefore address socio-technical factors as well as the modular approaches. Work Package 2 of the Mine.io project is a Comprehensive workspace and the foundation of the other technical work packages. In the recent months, from the start of the project, the work package started with the analysis of the Grant Agreement (GA) of all partners. All technologies, developments and objectives are defined in the GA.

The project has two groups of partners, the different Pilot Sites were on one side and the technology providers on the other. The connection points between all partners, especially between the technology partners and the specific Pilot Site, were analysed and the Pilot Sites and the technology providers were brought together. From this collaboration, the specific tasks were specified and the requirements were defined. The definition of requirements is essential and forms the basis of any successful project. The requirements establish a mutual understanding between the Pilot Sites and the technology partners and ensure that they are working towards the same goal. Defining the requirements and terms of reference is crucial to minimise the risk of misunderstandings as well as possible problems arising later in the tasks and the project. Creating high quality requirements is a complex task that requires continuous attention from the beginning of the project.

Industrial companies, especially mining companies, are always linked to environmental and socio-economic factors. In the first month of the Mine.io project, studies of each Pilot Site were conducted and the impact of the technologies used was analysed. All Pilot Sites are significantly differend from each other, some are active mines and ore processing plants like KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. – Polkowice in Poland or former production mines like the Research and Education mine Reiche Zeche in Freiberg, Germany, now predominantly used for research and education. At each of the 7 Pilot Sites, different technologies are being developed and tested with partners. All use cases will employ their own infrastructure, software and interfaces, as standardisation is a major challenge in almost every industry segment. The Mine.io project partners also recognised this and set a focus on it. The first step was to collect all the hardware, software, AI, IoT, data sharing and infrastructure, test data, sensors, standards, cloud services, engineering tools and network components used in Mine.io.

Another key objective of the Mine.io project is to provide a systematic methodology for the creation and implementation of digitally enabled mining solutions. To facilitate the integration of different Mine.io technology solutions into end-to-end mining applications, the project is developing a Digital Mining Application Architecture. The work over several months was to create and present a logical view of the Mine.io architecture, detailing the main components of the architecture and their functionalities, as well as some of the interfaces between them.

The topics covered in the first month of the Mine.io project are summarised in deliverable D2.1 ” Functional and non-functional requirements in the digitisation of the mining sector ” and D2.2 “Mine.io Architecture Specification”, which are available for download from our Deliverables – Mine.io Horizon.