Globally, the mining industry is under pressure to integrate innovations into core business operations.

Over the past decades, the mining industry has gone through a challenging scenario for its operation. Improving productivity to overcome natural factors such as decreasing ore grades, deeper deposits, and harder rock mass, combined with a rise in environmental and social awareness, has boosted the industry to work to enhance their processes constantly. In this, innovation plays a critical role as a tool to improve the efficiency of its processes to reduce cost and meet the environmental norms. The future of mining lies in indulging technology and new solutions into the industry to succeed and deliver superior values. Globally, the mining industry is under pressure to integrate innovations into core business operations. Over the years, most mining companies have also made significant investments in a range of back-end technology systems. In embracing a digital future, miners will likely need to modernise many of the legacy systems and migrate to the digital core, raising a range of considerations around moving to high-end solutions. Henceforth, Industry Wired brings you a list of mining innovations in 2020.

Top three mining innovations of 2020

Digital Twin to effectively manage mining assets

Digital twin technology has become an increasingly noteworthy trend in efficaciously managing mining assets to improve daily operations and reduce cost. This is because a digital twin is an interactive and intelligent platform that allows users to practically utilise real-time digital data for better workflow automation, change management, system optimisation and scenario planning. A digital twin is the creation of a virtual, 3D replica of physical assets, structures, equipment, or entire mining sites. It enables users to collect, process, monitor, manage and share information about a particular asset. Data twin combines reality data, engineering data and IoT data to create a holistic overview of both surface and underground infrastructures which enables the mining industry to conduct ‘what if’ analyses and perform right-time monitoring. It also avails project teams to automate collaboration protocols thereby facilitating efficacious cooperation.

Moving the working system to cloud

To truly exploit emerging technologies as they become available, digital innovation must embrace the cloud. Cloud computing is the key enabler for bringing the technologies discussed above the fruition connecting MIoT data, unified across all mine sites the end-to-end mine value chain, with external data such as market information, customer contracts and weather forecast data. The elasticity of cloud computing allows for the scaling up of computing resources as they are needed and scaling down simulation infrastructure costs. Major ERP vendors have already adopted a ‘cloud-first’ strategy to generate real-time data from embedded sensors and share the data in the platform.

Implementing algorithms for marketing and trading

Digital advances in analytics are taking the world by storm. It creates opportunities for marketing and trading, particularly as algorithms are breathing new life into disruption models. The mining sector is responsible for billions of revenue, employment openings, innovation, and community development. For an industry that is deeply rooted in people’s lives, data analytics is the light at the end of the tunnel. Data analytics can help companies increase their dividends and decrease the costs of operations. The whole system of mining is extremely complicated and involves a large number and variety of equipment, technology and sciences. On top of all this, companies working in the sector should ensure the safety of workers. Using data, intelligent systems can predict when equipment or machinery could fail.