The vision of DIG_IT is the development of an insightful, smart, sustainable and inclusive system that will address the challenges of the mining industry. Dig_IT focuses on environmental impact mitigation, health and safety improvement, optimal operation and social acceptance to achieve the adoption of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in EU mining, by aiming to re-establish trust between the mines and society towards a sustainable future in raw material production.
The need to extract raw materials in a profitable, environmentally sound, and safe way for both the mining workforce and the communities is driving the mining industry towards innovative approaches to transform its operations. However, even though Industry 4.0 offers a wide spectrum of solutions and intelligent technologies, the mining industry is still hesitant to adopt such innovative approaches.
Dig_IT will address the needs of the mining industry to move forward towards a sustainable use of resources while keeping people and environment at the forefront of their priorities. In order to achieve that, Dig_IT proposes the development of a smart Industrial IIoT platform that will improve the efficiency and sustainability of mining operations by connecting cyber and physical systems. The platform will collect data from sensors at 3 levels: human, assets and environment, and will also incorporate both real time and historical market data.
Dig_IT’s overall objectives are:
• A secure, smart IIoT platform that will improve the efficiency and sustainability of mining operations by connecting cyber and physical systems.
• On-line measurements of asset-bound mining operations through the monitoring of critical assets (i.e tools, machines, vehicles).
• Online distributed measurements of higher accuracy than current methods for broad area sustainability measurements.
• A Smart Garment for mining personnel sensing Occupational Health, Safety and Environmental (OHSE) parameters, biometrics, and situational awareness.
• Big Data optimisation through improving data quality aiming to minimise unused data and increase accuracy of analysis
• Digital Twins (DTs) of the physical mine entities, systems and processes to gain insights on mining operations, including Geotechnical DTs, Fluid Dynamics DTs and assets DTs.
• A predictive operation system and predictive maintenance agents with increased fidelity for process optimization and predictive maintenance of equipment
• An Intelligent Toolbox for OHSE to support operational awareness and decision-making based on bio-signal analytics, air-quality forecasting, spatiotemporal person & asset tracking
• A Decision Support System (DSS) integrating data streams, existing subsystems, data analysis and intelligent systems, using bespoke visualization of processes, objects and parameters, aiming at increasing the sustainability of the mining operations
