Huawei Technologies Co Ltd
At present, the energy and mining industries are going through a revolution. Xu Yan, Executive Solution Manager of Huawei for the mining, oil and gas sectors says if mining is to keep up with such rapid transformation, it needs to dynamically upgrade and create value by leveraging digital technologies such as cloud computing, IoT, big data, AI, and 5G.
Cloud edge device synergy & smart mines
Currently, mining companies as well as oil and gas producers are building physical and virtual resource pools that are centrally managed, optimised, and automatically allocated based on the development requirements of core enterprise services. They are also applying large-scale physical computing resources to develop the environment for intelligent data processing and analysis applications.
However, these industries must still further integrate digital technologies to realise digital transformation and intelligent development. For mining scenarios, the technology supports predicting supply chain disruptions, optimising the use of energy, reducing environmental risks and even identifying on-site, unknown targets. Cloud and AI-based technology, for instance, will play a critical role in fulfilling these goals.
From the cloud side, a unified, centralised, and elastic cloud foundation should be established for the centralised deployment, integration, and application sharing of core service systems. A standardised and maintenance-free cloud application environment should be provided to improve the efficiency of application deployment and O&M. On top of the cloud foundation, a unified, open, and standard mining data platform as well as a universal, open, and scalable AI platform should be deployed. This will provide centralised data services and intelligence for the cloud foundation, enabling it to better serve various businesses.
From the edge/device side, there is a demand for using sensing, interconnection, and data convergence to realise real-time supervision, intelligent diagnosis, automatic processing, and intelligent optimisation for mining production and mineral processing/concentration. In this regard, Huawei offers end-to-end solutions, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) such as computing, storage, and network, a unified cloud platform with the mining data platform and AI platform built on it, and platforms that help customers realise intelligent exploration, drilling, production, collaborative research, and intelligent decision-making. In addition, through cloud-edge-device synergy, Huawei trains and delivers algorithms on the cloud to execute computing and intelligent diagnosis/processing on the device side and edge side, greatly improving the response speed and production efficiency.
With the synergy, Huawei has been able to provide the below benefits for its customers:
Data enablement: Huawei helps customers break data silos, build a centralised data platform, and solve issues encountered in collaboration between scientific research and production. It allows customers to realise large-scale data calculation and sharing, and supports comprehensive online research in fields like exploration, development, engineering, reserves, and mining rights, greatly improving exploration efficiency.
AI enablement: ModelArts can complete model training tasks with high precision and efficiency. In the oil & gas industry, Huawei can train massive simulation samples to interpret geophysical data with AI technologies, helping experts improve work efficiency. Take Huawei’s AI-based seismic interpretation based on ModelArts as an example; during research, this solution reduces the time required for interpreting seismic layers and faults from months to a few hours. Moreover, it helps promulgate previous expert experience to facilitate underground oil and gas reservoir research, oilfield production, and intelligent decision-making. Further, in the mining industry, Huawei launched the Pangu Mining Model in July 2023, with the goal of allowing AI to replace humans in dangerous work and repetitive labors, precipitating expert experience and playing an important role in the fields of intelligent production, equipment management, safety operations and operational decision-making in
Application enablement: In the oil & gas industry, Huawei offers high-performance computing clusters and massive storage systems to improve computing and storage performance, allowing enterprises to focus more on their core services. Application integrated on the cloud as well as cloud-native applications improve the accuracy and efficiency of seismic data processing and interpretation, enabling further breakthroughs in oil exploration and development businesses. And in the mining industry, Huawei incorporates 21 different scenarios applications in the Mining Model, including coal mining, tunnelling, primary transportation, auxiliary transportation, lifting, safety monitoring, rock burst prevention, coal preparation and coking.
The mining industry and oil & gas are undergoing a revolution brought by the digital wave. In relation to this, oil & gas exploration and mining production have always been an ideal sector to test emerging technologies. Tech such as high-performance computing, cloud, and AI will play an important role in improving the efficiency and precision of exploration and development, shortening the exploration period, increasing the success rate of exploration, and minimising operational risks. We believe that digital technologies will become widely applied to oil & gas, mining and new energy in the future. Through data collision and algorithm training, we can greatly improve energy consumption efficiency. For these industries, we can develop more intelligent and functional applications on IT systems with cloud-edge-device synergy and linkage. Together, we can instill intelligence into the energy industry and usher in a new era of mining production and oil & gas exploration.
Xu Yan, Executive Solution Manager of Huawei for the mining, oil and gas sectors