Weir Minerals has announced a new partnership with XMPro, a digital twin platform, to enable intelligent equipment and services and support miners to achieve higher performance while also reducing the environmental footprint of their operations, the mining OEM says.
The XMPro platform – as a part of the Synertrex® digital ecosystem – will facilitate the delivery of event intelligence, predictive analytics and real-time insights, Weir Minerals said. It allows for data orchestration and value creation from multiple sources, including sensors, miners’ digital ecosystems and data only available to Weir Minerals as an OEM, like maintenance data and 3D engineering models, it said.
The platform identifies critical events by applying artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, which will provide Weir Minerals’ customers with the next generation of predictive services and recommended actions. XMPro facilitates easy collaboration between reliability engineering and operations by providing real-time information and equipment insights, viewed via mobile devices and the Synertrex intelligence web portal, according to the company.
Ole Knudsen, Weir Minerals, Director Digital, said: “XMPro takes an actionable and collaborative approach to data that closely aligns with our Synertrex digital ecosystem. It is a platform ensuring maximum customer value from all the data we collect, ranging from equipment and process data to the in-house data we have access to as an OEM. We see the multiple data source approach as essential to build the holistic digital twins providing ‘intelligence’ to our customers in terms of insights, predictiveness and recommendations allowing for a proactive approach to maintenance planning and execution.
“Within the foreseeable future, we see these platforms and the building of the multiple data-source digital twins providing even more value for Weir Minerals and our customers, which is enabled by closing the loop between real-time operations, equipment design and manufacturing.”
Pieter van Schalkwyk, CEO XMPro, said: “The partnership between Weir and XMPro creates a unique opportunity for mining companies to accelerate their digital transformation journey for complex assets. It combines Weir’s deep domain expertise and rich asset information models with XMPro’s class-leading real-time, operational digital twin platform. This combination provides unique insights, prescriptive maintenance and operations recommendations for users of Weir’s extensive range of mining equipment.
“It has been a pleasure working with Weir’s engineering team, who are not only deep domain experts on mining processes but also have a clear vision of their roadmap for digital solutions that provide real-time operational intelligence for the overall mining value chain. We are excited that XMPro is the platform that Weir chose to deliver these capabilities to end-users.”