The initiative, which confirmed higher transmission speed levels compared to other systems, was carried out by the Government of Chile using connectivity solutions from Nokia and technology from PSINet.

“5G, thanks to its characteristics such as low latency and high speed, will allow mass communication between devices and, therefore, will promote the existence of processes that will benefit both people and all productive sectors in the country. We are working to facilitate the conditions for different industries to learn about this technology closely so that they can adopt it when it becomes available. The development of 5G will contribute to Chile’s productivity, in addition to improving people’s quality of life through the development of applications such as telemedicine, the Internet of Things and distance education, among other benefits,” said the Minister of Transport and Telecommunications, Gloria Hutt.

For his part, the Minister of Mining, Baldo Prokurica, indicated that “this 5G connection in Codelco’s Radomiro Tomic division is a historic milestone for Chilean mining, because it means that the country’s main industry is opening up to the new world of mining, artificial intelligence, which will allow faster access to data and perform analysis to improve processes, increase productivity, and move towards a more secure activity.”

In turn, the Undersecretary of Telecommunications, Pamela Gidi, said that “one of the main objectives of our Government is that telecommunications improve the quality of life of people and serve as an enabler for the development of all productive sectors of the country. In this sense, we are promoting various pilots in 5G, such as the one today, within the framework of the ‘5G Observatory’, an initiative that we developed together with the IDB. This so that once the deployment of this technology is carried out, industries as important companies such as mining, are already in a position to start implementing it within their production processes quickly and easily.”

The pioneering experience with 5G carried out at Codelco marked the debut of its new technological cluster, in which the new CIO-E is a kind of central brain that provides strategic support services, process optimisation, advanced control and control systems, and advanced analytics to its current three Centros Integrados de Operaciones Tacticos (CIOs-T) that operate in Calama, Los Andes and Rancagua.

This comprehensive visualisation has two purposes, to provide each CIO-Tactician with support in process performance analysis, problem diagnosis, specialised support in advanced control strategies, condition monitoring for maintenance, slope and geotechnical monitoring or activity reports and generate process optimisation through data analysis provided by advanced analytics algorithms, transferring the best practices detected in any of the three integrated tactical centres.

“The ultimate goal is operational excellence. What we seek is to standardise, scale or transfer practices from one CIO-T to another to continually optimise the integral operation of the system,” explains Codelco’s Vice President of Technology and Business Process Automation, Álvaro García.

Codelco CIO-E project in detail

In the field of technology applied to business processes, the state-owned company has three stated focus areas: automation for its production areas, optimisation of its information and the application of advanced data analytics and the use of mathematical algorithms to optimise processes. This last function will be one of the main objectives of the new CIO-E that Codelco has just implemented in its corporate building.

It is a new work centre located on the 8th floor of the Codelco headquarters, in central Santiago. In this place, all the support and optimisation services to the three tactical CIOs of the company will be gathered: slope monitoring, condition monitoring and advanced control system support of the plants, among others.

The new CIO-E is a kind of central brain where a team specialised in systems analysis will be permanently monitoring the indicators thrown up by the intelligent systems of Codelco’s three CIO-Ts: Calama, where teams from the Ministro Hales Division and Chuquicamata Underground are remotely located for monitoring and control of these mines; Los Andes from where the operations of the Andina Division are monitored and controlled and the Rancagua site for the El Teniente Division.

This comprehensive visualisation has two purposes, to provide each CIO-Tactician with support in process performance analysis, problem diagnosis, specialised support in advanced control strategies, monitoring of conditions for maintenance or activity reports and generating process optimisation via transfer of best practices detected in any of the three tactical centres.

“The ultimate goal is operational excellence. What we seek is to standardise, scale or transfer practices from one CIO-T to another to continually optimise the integral operation of the system,” explains Codelco’s Vice President of Technology and Business Process Automation, Álvaro García.

To date, each CIO-T worked in a particular way and their efforts were not very visible to other operations. The new CIO-E will allow visualisation of the operations of the three centres (Calama, Los Andes and Rancagua) to detect good practices and replicate them.

“The monitoring of the processes for their analysis and optimisation, and the timely obtaining of metallurgical balance information, are some of the valuable aspects that this new way of working will allow us to capture,” expressed Patricio Vergara, Vice President of Resource Management, Miners and Development, the department that will lead the work of this new centre.

The Corporate Manager of Codelco’s Technology and Business Process Automation Projects, José Ramón Abatte, explains that “these are opportunities for improvement that must be captured. For example, if each of our three tactical CIOs has their own slope monitoring system, our strategic CIO will be able to define the best practices of each one and propose a new service that takes the best of everything.”

The work of this new centre will allow the company to obtain more information from the field, to have more quantitative measurements and to support decision-making in the operation. “To date, a plant operator who controls that a valve reaches a certain flow, then makes decisions according to its variables and according to its way of operating. This system, on the other hand, will give us a recommendation to optimise the recovery of the mineral on the basis of measurements in similar processes that can be visualised through the three CIO-Ts: measurement of bubbles, pH, etc” says Camilo Manríquez, an engineer in charge of this project in the areas of Management of Technology Projects and Codelco Automation.

“The CIO-E is a true information hub, with different characteristics, coming from the operations that, through the new technological tools, will be converted into knowledge, allowing us to make findings and propose opportunities for business improvement, in favour of the efficiency and sustainability of the exploitation of our resources” says Pamela Mora, Corporate Director of Data Intelligence and Metallurgical Balance.