From Pit to Port: Optimising Mining Operations to Enhance Performance, Safety and Sustainability
Digitalisation is critical to competing in this ever-changing environment and achieving higher levels of agility, efficiency, safety and profitability. Successful companies will be able to meet both the increasing global demand for resources for a growing population with increasing standards of living, all while balancing the need to both address and meet sustainability goals.
Tackling mining operations challenges starts with the digital mine, which drives more sustainable operations by accurately predicting when equipment will fail and enabling better real-time decision-making.
Traditional preventative maintenance guidelines and programs are often implemented by mining companies as suggested by the manufacturers. These programs can be extremely expensive to execute and don’t always ensure that optimal equipment utilisation is achieved.
Preventative maintenance can also diminish utilisation rates, or, in some circumstances, create issues where none existed before. Similarly, following the manufacturers’ maintenance schedule does not always ensure that trucks won’t fail. This can lead to unplanned maintenance activities which, at best, can reduce plant productivity and, at worst, can pose a safety risk to operators and other assets.
In mining, the ease of solution deployment and scalability across assets are significant benefits for businesses. Asset performance management (APM) solutions that incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) allow mines to anticipate equipment failures and better plan operations and maintenance activities. The ability to predict and prevent breakdowns allows mining companies to effectively reduce the risk of surprises to a minimum and avoid significant unplanned downtime. These solutions leverage existing equipment data and can be implemented remotely.
Prescriptive maintenance goes an extra step beyond preventative maintenance by not only identifying potential issues but providing a specific remedy to address the problem. Accurate prescriptive maintenance capabilities enable a new way of making collaborative decisions based on asset conditions and quantitative reports. This technology requires staff to know the equipment and the process, not data science. The software does the heavy lifting, allowing maintenance teams to monitor large fleets of assets remotely and prioritise critical repairs.
In addition to monitoring equipment for potential failures, mines can leverage digital tools to evaluate thousands of different production scenarios in minutes. With insight into which factors have the greatest impact on production, mines can adjust accordingly and increase confidence in the plan. These solutions allow mines to minimise operational risks and uncertainty and avoid surprises like unplanned downtime.
AspenTech has four decades of experience optimising processes and assets for global companies in capital-intensive markets like Metals & Mining. With proven innovations that reduce unplanned downtime, increase throughput and improve safety and sustainability, our digital technology helps optimise operations – from pit to port.
One particular prescriptive maintenance solution available from AspenTech, the market leader in AI and ML, provides an opportunity for maintenance managers to introduce advanced, proprietary ML technology to inform decisions, detect potential issues early, optimise equipment use, decrease costs and lengthen the life of high CAPEX assets. The solution can also identify data patterns, specifically which patterns are demonstrating “normal behavior” within a given system based on historical data. Agents are placed in the system to monitor the equipment in real time, capturing all data from the system. When these agents detect behavior that falls outside the established norms, alerts are triggered for certain events that may lead to future failures. With an ability to mark specific warnings as acceptable – the solution provides very few false positives.
By gaining insights on when unplanned maintenance events occur, mining companies can make informed decisions to create maintenance schedules that are aligned with and complement preventative maintenance schedules, rather than simply implementing the OEM’s suggested maintenance plan.
With the high commodity prices in the current market, mining companies are in an optimal position to take advantage of advanced and highly scalable technologies such as prescriptive maintenance to maintain wider margins and ensure they remain as competitive as possible in today’s extremely challenging business environment.
Watch this video to learn more about AspenTech’s prescriptive maintenance solution for the metals and mining industry.
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