Smart mine solutions and their successful applications

0 1 Overview

1.1 Background

At present, China's national economy has shifted from a stage of high-speed growth to a stage of high-quality development, and is in a crucial period of transforming the development model, optimizing the economic structure, and replacing old growth drivers with new ones. Under the situation of the deep integration of the "two modernizations", the industrial field is ushering in great changes in industrial development. The rapid development of the Internet and artificial intelligence technology has brought subversive changes to many traditional industries. The integration of high-tech with traditional technical equipment and management to achieve industrial transformation and upgrading is becoming an increasingly important development trend. It is in this context that smart mines are proposed and rapidly developed.

Mining coal resources is a production activity carried out by human underground. In order to create a safe and reliable mining environment suitable for equipment operation and personnel work, more than 90 subsystems such as detection, ventilation, drainage, fire prevention, power supply, working face mining equipment and transportation need to be operated at the same time. These subsystems, like the organs of the human body, together form a large-scale complex operating system. After years of development, this system has experienced mechanization, single machine automation, integrated automation, digital and other stages. At present, the mechanization degree of coal mine safe and efficient mine system has reached more than 90%, and the single machine automation has become increasingly perfect, and a number of tens of millions of tons of mine groups have been built, and a primary multi-system digital mine integrated automation system has been developed. However, at present, the overall degree of informatization in coal mines still needs to be further improved, and various data and information in the production process cannot be effectively related, and there is also a lack of "intelligent brain" to coordinate and jointly control all subsystems, so the production process control, equipment health management, safety risk prevention and control, ecological environmental protection, etc., have not yet achieved optimal management and control.

Wisdom is the highest form of mine technology development, only by realizing wisdom can we fundamentally realize the optimal production mode, the best operating efficiency and the safest production guarantee.

Since March 2016, The National Development and Reform Commission, the National Energy Administration, and the Ministry of Natural Resources have successively issued numerous programmic documents such as the Action Plan for Energy Technology Revolution and Innovation (2016-2030), the National Mineral Resources Plan (2016-2020), the 13th Five-Year Plan for Coal Industry Development, and the 13th Five-Year Plan for Safe Production. The guidance requirements for mine automation, informatization, digitization and intelligence are put forward respectively, and the direction for the future green development of mining enterprises is pointed out.

Based on the above analysis, it can be clearly seen that the construction of smart mines is the development trend and inevitable direction. Smart mining is to promote the comprehensive application of a new generation of network information technologies such as cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and mobile communication in the field of mining on the basis of mine automation, information technology and digitization.

1.2 Definition of smart mine

Scholars have carried out a lot of research on smart mines, not only scholars and enterprises related to the coal field actively participate in the research and application of smart mines, a large number of non-coal mine enterprises and researchers have also joined the construction of smart mines. They each put forward various definitions and structures of smart mines according to their own understanding, research basis and expertise, but did not reach a unified understanding.

Comprehensive research results of scholars at home and abroad, combined with our many years of experience in the field of mining, we believe that: smart mine is the comprehensive application of intelligent industrial Internet of things and software-defined technology in the field of mining, is a typical Cyber Physical system (CPS). By integrating advanced information technology such as perception, calculation, communication and control and automatic control technology, the complex system of safety and production factors such as human, machine, environment and pipe mapping, timely interaction and efficient collaboration between the mine physical world and the information world is built.

The smart mine has four characteristics, namely, the interconnection of everything, spatio-temporal service, integration and linkage, and intelligent decision-making.

(1) Internet of Everything: The use of Internet of Things technology to fully perceive the position and status of underground people, machines, rings, etc., and can control the equipment.