Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Dig_IT (A Human-centred Internet of Things Platform for the Sustainable Digital Mine of the Future)
Période du rapport: 2023-05-01 au 2024-10-31
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
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
Dig_IT has reached the end of the project, achieving its ultimate goal: the development of an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoTp) platform that collects data from the mining industry (data sources: humans, machines, environment and market) and transforms it into knowledge and actions aimed at improving the health and safety of workers, improving the efficiency of operations and minimizing the environmental impact of mining.
The Dig_IT platform has been deployed and is operational in five mines across Europe, the five use cases of the project (Kemi, Finland; Marini Marmi, Italy, La Parrilla, Spain, Titania, Norway; Hannukainen, Finland).
The main technologies involved in the Dig_IT platform are:
1. Data acquisition at four different levels: people, assets, environment and market. Data stem from legacy and new sensors installed in the mines. Moreover, low CAPEX sensors for environmental monitoring and Smart Garments, with embedded miniaturized sensing devices, to assess occupational health, safety and environmental parameters, have been developed.
2. Digital twins: Real time models of mining operations or processes to provide risk maps at three levels: (i) Machinery (predictive maintenance); (ii) Geotechnics (soil stability); (iii) Fluid-dynamic processes (air & water quality).
3. Intelligence layer: AI-algorithms based on big data for: the optimal planning of the mining operations; early warning systems; predictive maintenance of the assets; miners health risks.
4. Decision Support System: Extensive dashboard suite that supports exploration and visually enabled data slicing, dicing and drilling down allowing laser-sharp focus into vital operational, safety and environmental impact aspects. Apart from raw physical data, the DSS system embeds insights and outputs that are provided by all relevant smart modules.
5. Distributed Ledger Technologies/Blockchain: IOTA network has been deployed to open some of the Dig_IT data to make it available to the world, thus increasing transparency w
The Dig_IT platform has been deployed and is operational in five mines across Europe, the five use cases of the project (Kemi, Finland; Marini Marmi, Italy, La Parrilla, Spain, Titania, Norway; Hannukainen, Finland).
The main technologies involved in the Dig_IT platform are:
1. Data acquisition at four different levels: people, assets, environment and market. Data stem from legacy and new sensors installed in the mines. Moreover, low CAPEX sensors for environmental monitoring and Smart Garments, with embedded miniaturized sensing devices, to assess occupational health, safety and environmental parameters, have been developed.
2. Digital twins: Real time models of mining operations or processes to provide risk maps at three levels: (i) Machinery (predictive maintenance); (ii) Geotechnics (soil stability); (iii) Fluid-dynamic processes (air & water quality).
3. Intelligence layer: AI-algorithms based on big data for: the optimal planning of the mining operations; early warning systems; predictive maintenance of the assets; miners health risks.
4. Decision Support System: Extensive dashboard suite that supports exploration and visually enabled data slicing, dicing and drilling down allowing laser-sharp focus into vital operational, safety and environmental impact aspects. Apart from raw physical data, the DSS system embeds insights and outputs that are provided by all relevant smart modules.
5. Distributed Ledger Technologies/Blockchain: IOTA network has been deployed to open some of the Dig_IT data to make it available to the world, thus increasing transparency w
Dig_IT has developed a novel IIoT platform for the mining industry, that collects data from the mining industry (data sources: humans, machines, environment and market) and transforms it into knowledge and actions aimed at improving the health and safety of workers, improving the efficiency of operations and minimizing the environmental impact of mining.
The main innovation lines, beyond the state of the art, can be summarized in the following list:
Smart Garment for miners offers an integrated, fully open-source based, wearable solution that will provide improved localisation technologies, sensors to measure OHSE parameters (i.e. temperature, humidity, gases and radiation, overloading effort), biometrics sensors (heart rate, sweat and body temperature) and an AI-enabled voice processing module for emergency communications with colleagues and administrative staff in multiple languages. The data gathered by the smart garment, together with the AI models that postprocess the data in the platform, will stand as a enhanced warning system to ensure the safety of the workers.
Virtual sensors for air quality inside mines: Virtual sensors to predict the air quality in real time in the underground space have deployed and validated in two use cases. Future developments toward higher TRLs (>TRL5) will pave the way towards optimized ventilation on demand systems, leading to a more safe underground space and to a optimized energy consumption for ventilation.
AI models for predictive maintenance of mining machinery and to support the smart scheduling of the mine operations have been deployed and it has been demonstrated their potential to reduce the OPEX of the mining industry.
Blockchain for sustainability compliance and community alliance: Dig_IT Distributed Ledger-based Sustainability Compliance Labelling (SCL), shows trusted sustainability information to the local communities and the public, as illustrated in the Hannukainen mine:
https://hannukainenmining.fi/en/online-monitoring/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
The main innovation lines, beyond the state of the art, can be summarized in the following list:
Smart Garment for miners offers an integrated, fully open-source based, wearable solution that will provide improved localisation technologies, sensors to measure OHSE parameters (i.e. temperature, humidity, gases and radiation, overloading effort), biometrics sensors (heart rate, sweat and body temperature) and an AI-enabled voice processing module for emergency communications with colleagues and administrative staff in multiple languages. The data gathered by the smart garment, together with the AI models that postprocess the data in the platform, will stand as a enhanced warning system to ensure the safety of the workers.
Virtual sensors for air quality inside mines: Virtual sensors to predict the air quality in real time in the underground space have deployed and validated in two use cases. Future developments toward higher TRLs (>TRL5) will pave the way towards optimized ventilation on demand systems, leading to a more safe underground space and to a optimized energy consumption for ventilation.
AI models for predictive maintenance of mining machinery and to support the smart scheduling of the mine operations have been deployed and it has been demonstrated their potential to reduce the OPEX of the mining industry.
Blockchain for sustainability compliance and community alliance: Dig_IT Distributed Ledger-based Sustainability Compliance Labelling (SCL), shows trusted sustainability information to the local communities and the public, as illustrated in the Hannukainen mine:
https://hannukainenmining.fi/en/online-monitoring/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)