Lean Mining - Development of production systems

Objective and work plan

The current status of Scandinavian mining industry is characterized by semi-autonomous to autonomous and intelligent production machines. Since many of these autonomous machines are expected to perform round the clock, the importance of system characteristics such as reliability, availability, flexibility and controllability are of prime importance. Other area is focused on seamless integration of information to realize the vision of autonomous mining system and been actively developing and implementing the concept of collaborative and intelligent operation and maintenance for operating systems. Therefore, the vision of a Digital Mine with autonomous mining systems seems a possibility especially with the advent of new and emerging technologies together with willingness of mining industry to make investment towards semi autonomous and autonomous mining systems.

For achieving lean production, all the processes and systems need to communicate in real time so as to eliminate uncertainty and address the critical issues and challenges often arising at short notices in a continuously changing environment as found in mining operations.

The plan for research development intends to take the mining industry several steps forward in creating a reliable robust and productive autonomous mining system. Our goal is to build a state of the art research capability in the area of mine production system by working on the following subproject addressing the critical issues to realise the vision of lean mining system.