Zyfra Mining (formerly VIST Group) recently completed the 80th installation of its mine fleet management system (Zyfra OpenMine, formerly VG Karier), which improves efficiency and safety in open pit mining, based on individual requirements of mining customers. Zyfra Mining’s 80th installation was at the Shougang Hierro Peru open-pit iron ore mine for mining contractor Cosapi Mineria. The company told IM: “The joint project with Cosapi Mineria gives us an opportunity to demonstrate the advantages and competitiveness of our solutions to mining companies in Latin America. By 2021 we plan to add our solutions to 100 locations across the globe.”
Using Zyfra OpenMine, after each load and unload, drivers obtain the optimum route according to several criteria. The data is seen by the excavator operators and the truck drivers on the smart panels in the cabin. Dynamic optimisation enables the distribution of haul trucks along routes in an open cycle with a multi-criteria optimisation factor. The system also allows shift changes, break times, refueling, etc, to be optimised and haul trucks’ loading violations to be managed and monitored. Monitoring production parameters and vehicle health in real time results in an average cost reduction through fuel saving and an increase in productivity of trucks. The payload and fuel level monitoring systems increase the average payload of haul trucks, and reduce underloading and overloading.
Zyfra Mining states: “In order to increase production efficiency in accordance with industrial safety standards, there is a need to develop innovative solutions for the mining industry, including: dispatching and diagnostic systems, autonomous dump trucks and drill rigs, and analytics for solving mining process optimisation problems. Mining companies face the challenges of providing industrial safety while simultaneously increasing the completeness and efficiency of ore output, extracting useful components from it and increasing the productivity of mining equipment operations. All these challenges have been addressed over a long period of time in the mining industry. But the use of digital technologies can make it possible to do so on quite a different level of quality.”
The first open-pit mine in Russia to begin implementing these digital technologies was the Chernigovets coal mine (Kemerovo Region, Siberia) owned by the company SDS-Ugol. In 2001 the enterprise implemented the Zyfra OpenMine FMS (then called VG Karier) developed by VIST Group (now part of Zyfra Group). Implementation of the system is resulting in increase in the productivity of the mining and transport complex by 4-15%.
Elsewhere, at Kachkanarsk GOK (Sverdlovsk Region, the Urals) iron ore mine owned by EVRAZ, the system has seen an increase in the productivity of trucks by 8% thanks to mining equipment digitalisation. To automatically determine the ore quality, a high accuracy excavator scoop positioning capability was installed at every digging point, which allowed the model to be integrated into a unified field system.
Zyfra Mining states: “The need for serious changes in the industry sector is long-standing, and the business has realised that. Particularly in the Urals: an old industrial region where ore mining and processing was once the backbone of economy, but where now only a handful of the rich deposits remain, with the old pits largely having been mined out. Today mining groups have to develop deposits which no one would tackle 50 years ago and which contain a very low concentration of useful elements. This is why the search for cost reduction options is so pressing as a business task.”
In 2020 there are plans to integrate railway transport into the Kachkanarsk GOK project. Intelligent traction equipment is expected to be installed so that the operators of the electric locomotive and excavator can interact during loading. This will allow information about the ore being transported to be received and the process to be managed.
Zyfra Mining adds: “Today several other projects in the area of data analysis, increasing efficiency of resource usage in production processes and reducing electric energy consumption are under development. In the process of working on these projects, we have marked out the digital technologies as those which allow people, systems and machines to interact instantaneously, to carry out instantaneous analysis or sophisticated calculations within the framework of conventional processes, or those technologies allowing you to search for hidden interconnections in the processes being observed. Such understanding has enabled us to determine the essence of the changes being implemented and to calculate the volume of projects being developed more precisely. We have agreed that digital technologies should eventually allow for a reduction in the usage of resources for execution of production process, lower the number of errors in routine processes or help people with complex problem solving within a limited period of time. If they won’t allow you to do something to that effect, then it is not worth the trouble of implementing them.”
For IT project implementation, Zyfra Mining has developed specific technology, which it is adapting and developing from project to project. “We see our role in developing digital technologies in order to provide organisations with a comprehensible scheme of working with them and give them access to ready-to-use set of technologies to solve problems most frequently encountered in practice. This will allow us to increase the efficiency of separate production or operational processes and give impetus to the implementation of digital technologies in various spheres of enterprise operation.”
