Establishing and operating a smart monitoring & optimisation centre for Kazakh mining

The Kazakhstan Mining Industry Competence Centre in (MICC) has signed a five-year agreement with Cambridge-based IntelliSense.io to partner with and jointly operate a Smart Monitoring & Optimisation Centre (SMOC) for the national mining industry.

The SMOC will be the first of its kind in Kazakhstan and one of the first in Central Asia. It will monitor the country’s mining operations to ensure that pit-to-port processes run with minimum variability, acting as the first line of support for IntelliSense.io OaaS applications that deliver continuous process optimisation. The SMOC will communicate proactively with mine engineering and management teams, as well as introduce new ways of running an operation that balances technical efficiency, productivity and financial economics.

The Vice Minister of Investment and Development of Kazakhstan, Erlan Khairov, and the UK Minister of State for Trade and Investment, Rt Hon Greg Hands MP, presided over the signing, which took place at the UK-Kazakhstan Inter-Governmental Commission in London.

“We are thrilled to be opening the SMOC in conjunction with IntelliSense.io to ensure that Kazakhstan is firmly at the forefront of innovation in mining,” said Sanzhar Kettebekov, General Director of Almaty Tech Garden, which is part of the MICC. “As a Centre of Excellence, we fully understand the importance of updating our technologies for Industry.4.0. The SMOC will provide a significant competitive edge to our mining industry and facilitates proper industry transformation and a transparent strategy to integrate Industry 4.0 to our country’s mining industry.”

The SMOC is part of the country’s 1% Mine Subsoil Reporting Program, which requires routine reporting of site performance.

“IntelliSense.io technologies deliver a step change in productivity and efficiency across mining operations resulting in increased yield and reduced operating expense,” said Sam G. Bose, CEO and Founder, IntelliSense.io. “By integrating modern computing technologies such as the Internet of Things and Big Data with advanced data science capabilities through our machine learning algorithms, we are bringing a new category of No CapEx solutions to the mining industry. By proactively communicating with busy mine operations teams through prediction of incoming materials and circuit optimisation opportunities identified by our applications, we aim to help the operations team overcome the ‘variability’ challenge and progress towards steady state operations.”

By IntelliSense.io having its OaaS applications delivered in various geographies, the SMOC is also a platform to learn from other industries and geographies, and to benchmark process and equipment performance. The SMOC is scheduled to be open and operating from the beginning of January 2017.

The SMOC for Mining in Kazakhstan will be IntelliSense’s first centre, with a similar mining optimization centre planned to open early 2017 in Santiago, Chile.

IntelliSense.io is a market leader in providing innovative real-time data analytics applications over resilient wireless sensor networks for natural resources industries. IntelliSense.io offers a leading Industrial Internet of Things platform for delivering “Optimisation as a Service” applications. IntelliSense.io applications portfolio has been deployed in the mining industry across Latin America and Kazakhstan for base and precious metal mining operations.