Mine + Intelligence: What kind of mine is smart mine

Why build smart mines?

Zhang Yuansheng, director of intelligent Mine Center of Beijing Mining and Metallurgy Science and Technology Group Company: At present, the world has entered a new era of intelligent development, in China, the economy has changed from high-speed development to high-quality development. In this context, the mining industry is faced with many challenges - the relatively low price of mineral products, the increasingly deep exploitation of resources, and the harsh operating environment. In addition, the serious aging of employees, talent shortage, rising labor costs, safety and environmental protection requirements are becoming more and more stringent for the development of the mining industry has brought great challenges. The global mining industry is also experiencing a new revolution, and the combination of big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things is becoming more and more close to the mine. The mining production mode is constantly updated, the mining industry is developing in the direction of planning, intensification and coordination, the mining engineering has entered the remote control, intelligent and even unmanned stage, and the selection and smelting process has fully realized automation and gradually expanded to the intelligent stage. From exploration data to reserve data, from production data to operational data, mining big data is also gradually showing strong productivity. The global mining industry has fully entered a new historical stage based on the global allocation of resources, guaranteed by the international operation of enterprises, taken transnational cooperation as a means, and taken green, ecological, intelligent and harmonious as a goal. Therefore, the development of intelligent and even unmanned mining technology, innovation of mining mode, reduce underground workers, is the only way for the global mining industry. Peter Yang, President, International Area, Caterpillar Surface Mining and Development: Unmanned transportation systems are very important for mines, which means increased safety and efficiency, and truly zero injuries and zero time loss. In addition, the big data analysis of mechanical utilization rate is also very important, which can enable the mine to improve the efficiency of mechanization and avoid unnecessary losses caused by improper maintenance and downtime.

Ge Qifa, director of the Information and Intelligent Center of China Enfei Mining Division: At present, the industry is still facing some problems and challenges: from the perspective of global mining, mainly the fluctuation of the bulk metal market, the increase of investment project risk, the shortage of labor capacity, production efficiency needs to be improved, and the innovation ability needs to be improved. From China's point of view, the main mining safety standards, environmental standards are getting higher and higher, labor shortage, mining conditions are getting worse and worse, mining scale is getting larger and larger, ore grade is getting lower and lower.

Since the 1960s, the research of intelligent digital mine has been carried out abroad. The relevant work in our country started in the 1990s of last century. At present, including Sweden, Finland, Australia, Canada, South Africa and other countries have respectively put forward the planning of intelligent mine construction and intelligent mine research and development plans, China also has relevant plans in the "intelligent manufacturing 2025".

Giacoko Rukojarvi, Global Business Development Manager, Sandvik Automation: The mining sector is currently undergoing a major transformation, which is related to the production environment of the mining industry, especially in the underground mining environment, which brings a variety of new challenges to production. In the traditional mining field, all aspects of production are relatively conservative, leaving a lot of room for improvement and improvement. Moreover, as the mining of mineral resources becomes deeper and deeper, new challenges will continue to emerge, and the technical solutions to these challenges are robotization, electronization, digitization and remote operation, which can not only bring about the improvement of production capacity, but also help reduce capital investment and production costs, and improve safety.

Yu Guizhen, founder of Beijing Tage Zhixing Technology Co., LTD. : Through research, it is found that there are many vehicles transporting ores and earthmoving in open-pit mines, and there are two or three thousand large mines, and there are at least twenty or thirty small mines in general. Moreover, usually a car needs to be equipped with 2 ~5 drivers, which is very scarce, and it is also very high personnel costs for enterprises. From the driver's point of view, the working environment of mine transportation is very bad, dust, long-term bumps, etc., will cause great damage to their health. Therefore, the unmanned transformation of transport vehicles can save a lot of labor costs for enterprises on the one hand, and can also alleviate the current driver shortage and occupational health problems on the other hand.