The International Rock Excavation Data Exchange Standard (IREDES) and VDMA Mining, part of the Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA), have agreed to work together to address the industry’s growing interoperability needs.
The cooperation agreement will provide a second way to exchange IREDES standardised data across mining operations, according to IREDES.
IREDES is an established way of exchanging equipment-related operational information in mining, for example, allowing drill plans to be sent to rigs, or transferring performance information from LHDs and trucks to production departments.
IREDES said: “IREDES defines the mining- and equipment-related content contained in different profiles. These profiles are exchanged in widely used and fully open XML technology, which makes them compatible with a number of other XML-related standards used in digital transformation.”
VDMA Mining, meanwhile, represents well-known, mainly medium-sized companies in the fields of surface and underground mining, processing technology as well as consulting, research and development. On top of that, the VDMA cooperates with the OPC (Open Platform Communication) Foundation to develop “companion specifications” for its various branches, according to IREDES.
“In mines, supervisory control systems are using OPC/UA (Unified Architecture) to acquire process information. In order to enable a smooth integration of information from mobile underground equipment into the overall process coordination, IREDES has joined up with VDMA to integrate the IREDES content into an OPC/UA companion specification for mining,” IREDES said.
“OPC/UA, thereby, will become a second way of exchanging the IREDES standardised content.”
Through this cooperation, IREDES profiles, beside their availability as XML data sets, will be accessible as OPC/UA profiles for integration into the traditional automation world.
IREDES members include global mining companies as well as major global equipment manufacturers, system integrators and software providers.