Palantir Technologies Inc has renewed its multi-year enterprise agreement with Rio Tinto, extending the pair’s pact for an additional four years and securing Rio Tinto’s ongoing access to the Palantir Artificial intelligence Platform (AIP).
As an early adopter of Palantir Foundry (Foundry), Rio Tinto has already primed its operational landscape for the deployment of AI through the creation of a robust digital twin (or Ontology), Palantir says. Via the Ontology, AIP will enable Rio Tinto to build, test, and validate AI use cases at an accelerated pace and deploy them to production safely.
These AI use cases will follow and augment critical operational workflows Rio Tinto conducts in Foundry today. From managing plant operations to monitoring geotechnical risk to coordinating dozens of unmanned trains carrying iron ore, Foundry is enabling Rio Tinto to make well-informed decisions and take appropriate actions based on a single, unified source of truth, it added.
Bold Bataar, Rio Tinto’s Chief Commercial Officer, said: “Foundry has helped to transform the parts of our business where it has been applied. In our most high-stakes environments, we are empowering our people to find better ways of working, to improve how we operate our assets, increase performance and to innovate. The Foundry Ontology has made our structured data accessible, and AIP is doing the same for our unstructured data while enabling us to attack with pace problems previously deemed too complex.”
For network specialists and train controllers in the RTIO Operations Centre, in Western Australia, Foundry provides a view of rail operations, assembled from real-time data from hundreds of equipment units and systems in the value chain. With the Ontology providing a unified view of all assets, network specialists coordinate the haulage of iron ore by 53 driverless trains, each with 240 wagons, across the Pilbara rail network. They can optimise, collaborate on and execute complex routing decisions to balance production targets and maintenance needs. As a result, both railway throughput and safety have been improved.
In Mongolia, Foundry equips Rio Tinto with a dynamic understanding of geotechnical risk at Oyu Tolgoi, one of the world’s deepest and largest block cave mines. The mine’s challenging conditions require advanced risk management and constant surveillance to ensure safe production. The Ontology Rio Tinto has configured in Foundry integrates data from thousands of sensors across the mine and serves as a single source of information for cave health, instrumentation and risk, according to the company. This represents a new paradigm for block cave mining and has enabled various adjacent workflow innovations which will be further expanded through Palantir AIP.
Ted Mabrey, Palantir’s Head of Commercial, said: “We have high expectations for Rio Tinto’s utilisation of Palantir’s AIP based on what they have already achieved with Foundry and their ambition for secure use of AI. The Ontology created by Rio Tinto’s team in Foundry over the past three years enables fast deployment of AI solutions to some of Rio Tinto’s most pressing challenges and ensures best and safe operator practice in areas like risk identification, asset management, and supply chain order and fulfilment processes.”