Mine Site Technologies (MST) states that “while providing location details for all your people and equipment in real-time is useful, the opportunity to further process this data to achieve specific outcomes offers more tangible cost benefits.” As an example of this, one area where MST has worked with mine operators to expand the use of location data is in production monitoring. In its simplest form this is counting trip or cycle times by utilising the location data of the machines.

For example, in underground coal mines these trip reports can be monitoring in real-time shuttle car cycles for each shuttle car in a section. In hard rock and metalliferous underground mines it could include reporting trip times and cycles for trucks or loaders, such as between various loading points and ore passes. The information in the report can be further enhanced through the use of a Vehicle Intelligence Platform (VIP) data logger, on say a truck, that also logs the payload being carried in each cycle.

Further analysis of this data and reporting is used to create “Exception Reports” against pre-set parameters or thresholds, and an alert raised if there is an exception.  For example if a cycle time is much longer than the threshold time range an alert can be raised within the MineDash software, which can trigger further customised alerts to emails and other messaging systems.

In operations where more analysis is required the data can be loaded into a number of third party Fleet Management Systems (FMS) or dispatch systems. In many cases this automates what is currently a manual operation in these FMS applications, thus making them more reliable and less dependent on human operator input.