MINING 4.0 HOW DO WE GET THERE?
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— Case Study: Gold Fields Granny Smith
In 2021, Gold Fields in Australia contracted ABB to digitally optimise their Granny Smith gold mine. This was part of a strategic modernisation decision from Gold Fields to integrate its fleet intelligence and operations monitoring system onto one powerful platform that supports interoperability standards. Shannon McDermott, Superintendent for Technology Projects at Gold Fields Australia, explains the significance of the project.
“One of the benefits we’ll see immediately is more efficiencies in our short interval control, because today a lot of the work is still done manually with verbal commands over the radio,” says McDermott. “This will give us visibility of how our operators are performing against their daily shift schedules.” ABB estimates that the digital transformation of the Granny Smith mine will result in 15-30% productivity gains and much more in cost savings through mine optimisation, such as predictive maintenance and energy efficiencies. Whilst the solution is still in its development stage, McDermott is confident that once implemented, Granny Smith will experience a true “step change”. In particular, he acknowledges that one of the biggest hurdles with digital integration is the human adoption. “This is why we want to transition one process area and team at a time, starting with our haulage team, to get them used to the software from an operator perspective and mitigate any risks during the transition,” he says. “It will take time to get the software to a point where everyone is comfortable to use it and then we will break ties with the existing system.”
McDermott also acknowledges that collaboration is vital to the success of the project.
“With the software itself, we’re renovating and applying design thinking to how we’re developing it which is a win-win situation because ABB has allowed us to help shape the product,” he explains. “We stand to benefit from that but also there is the benefit on the ABB side of leveraging our 20 years plus underground mining knowledge and experience, and applying those learnings into their solution moving forward.” Significantly, ABB drew on the support of their partnership with the University of Western Australia’s (UWA) Industry 4.0 Energy & Resources Digital interoperability (I4.0 ERDi) Test Lab to build a digital twin of the Granny Smith system. This enabled both the Gold Fields and ABB teams to collaborate offsite to test their developments so they wouldn’t disrupt mine activity or production. They were able to eliminate bugs and verify the interoperability of mining equipment by running multiple scenarios on the digital twin at the test lab in Perth.
“This project has seen the introduction of ISA- 95-aligned architecture. What that means is we’ll actually be taking a digital dispatching solution and deploying that underground,” he says. “The ISA-95 standards allow us to have a plug and play architecture.” One of the primary objectives of the solution is to provide real-time visibility across production, starting with fleet management and automated scheduling. With sensors applied to machinery, planning and operations teams can monitor and see the whereabouts and operational state of critical equipment and personnel. Staff are also be able to receive documents or work orders live via smart tablets, as well as report their task completion or any interruptions in real time.
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