The Global Mining Guidelines Group (GMG), following its inaugural mining interoperability alignment roundtable two weeks ago in Perth, Australia, has come together with industry participants to launch an interoperability organisations taskforce.
This group will work toward fleshing out a detailed roadmap and develop a way of illustrating how all the pieces fit together, the GMG said.
GMG stated: “Interoperability is a priority for the mining industry and there are many ongoing projects, guidelines and standards being developed for it.”
The roundtable was designed to accelerate progress and enhance collaboration between organisations working on interoperability. It brought organisations working on different aspects of the issue – both inside and outside the mining industry – together to increase the visibility of ongoing interoperability initiatives and to prevent duplication of efforts, according to GMG.
Representatives from AMIRA, CSIRO, Enterprise Transformation Partners, GMG, IIC, ISO, Interop, IREDES, METS Ignited, and MI4 presented on their initiatives and discussed ways to move forward collaboratively.
GMG said: “The roundtable confirmed the need for coordination and knowledge sharing among organisations, and participants recognised that interoperability is a vast issue. While their projects focus on different aspects of interoperability, there are overlaps and many are interconnected in some way.”
GMG Managing Director, Heather Ednie, commenting on the breadth of what was presented, said: “We’re further ahead than we might think. Once the pieces are put together, you can see that there is a lot going on in an effort to solve interoperability challenges.”
Exposure will be just as important as coordination in ensuring these initiatives achieve their full potential, GMG said.
To foster this collaborative environment, these organisations and others working on the topic will form the interoperability organisations taskforce.
Among the participants, Ednie says, “There was a very strong willingness and appetite to work together”, also noting that many of these organisations and initiatives are backed by the same companies, so coordination is in their best interest as well.
This roundtable is part of GMG’s Interoperability and Functional Safety Acceleration Strategy (IFSAS), launched in early 2019 with support from BHP and Rio Tinto. This strategy aims to facilitate collaboration and accelerate progress on interoperability and functional safety. The interoperability component of this strategy also involves coordinating industry alignment on a direction and vision for interoperability through communication and engagement. These efforts will be directed by a steering committee comprising key stakeholders.
