The Global Mining Guidelines Group (GMG) has launched new projects in the fields of artificial intelligence and autonomous equipment to ensure mining companies can best leverage these technologies.

The ‘Open Data sets for AI in Mining’ project will be used for building open data sets to advance AI research and development, while the ‘Autonomous System Safety’ sub-project (under the Functional Safety for Autonomous Equipment project) looks to deliver valuable context and education on system safety, GMG said.

As GMG states: “Open and curated data sets can enhance the ability to build meaningful solutions for the industry by providing typical data relating to assets or operations for training and testing models and improving benchmarking and research by offering an alternative to proprietary data.”

The open data sets project will seek to leverage what the wider AI community has learned over time and ensure the approaches used in the mining domain are consistent with best practices, it added.

In terms of deliverables, the GMG is hoping for three core outcomes. Namely, a register of suitable candidate data sets, a set of guidelines for the collection and curation of these data sets and a set of repositories of gathered data.

“AI research and progress in many spheres has benefited hugely from having a set of public and curated datasets,” GMG said. “This has allowed for developers and researchers to have suitable data to test and train their models on for a variety of applications. Even more importantly, it has provided data which can be used to benchmark various solutions and allow for effective and fair comparison, as well as allowing for research to be repeated and validated.”

The ‘Autonomous Safety System’ sub-project, meanwhile, covers overall system safety. It will be a white paper to “provide valuable context and education on system safety, its history in other industries and how to deliver safe systems that can be operated effectively”, according to GMG.

The GMG said: “An outlook that expands the focus from functional safety to system safety will enable improved outcomes to the delivery of autonomous mining systems because:

• To ensure functional safety, autonomous systems need to perform their functions correctly;
• A technological system and its design within the operating environment can influence human performance;
• Delivering and benefiting from complicated and complex systems requires addressing the behaviour of their interactions;
• Cybersecurity risks affect all aspects of autonomous system safety; and
• A full picture of system safety is needed to achieve a balance of operations, reliability and other associated disciplines.