Objectives of the Product

Operative, infrastructural, and environmental safety are key priorities at mine sites. Mine operators and regulators need to systematically identify risks inherent to underground and surface operations on a continuous basis. The industry needs to employ technologies that can ensure the ongoing operation of critical controls, to generate insights regarding the effectiveness of mining operations to date. Monitoring technologies employed in mine installations tend to be bespoke, siloed solutions that require significant “human-in-the-loop” resources and manual data analysis.

The Protelum solution leverages Davra’s industry-leading IoT platform to consolidate all data sources by combining data from legacy data silos into a single unified data source. This allows cross-pollination between data sources facilitating analytical methodologies on combined datasets.

Customers and their Needs:

There are common thematic problems in managing mines that require continuous, iterative monitoring and management, specifically in the areas of water management, ground stability and environmental impact monitoring. The industry needs solutions that can work with hard and soft sensors and other monitoring technologies to provide continuous assurance of critical processes with less reliance on physical data capture and manual processing. Monitoring processes are important to industry and public stakeholders alike and are coming under increased social scrutiny and regulatory control. There is no “single pane of glass” mine management system that can collate hard and soft operational data, blend the data multi-modally with satellite, Earth observation (EO) and GNSS data and apply AI and machine learning to deliver key operational metrics and actionable insights. The PROTELUM project aims to deliver such a system.

Target customers/users’ countries

The target customers are as follows:

• Mine owners/operators
• Mine regulators/insurance companies
• People who live and work in the vicinity of mine sites (active and inactive)

The solution targets the global Mining Industry.

Product Description:

Davra is developing a cloud-based platform to monitor and manage mine tailings storage facilities (TSFs). The solution merges EO, drone and LIDAR data with available terrestrial data to show changes in the TSFs in order to manage its safety and to forecast potential physical breaches or environmental regulation breaches. It is the aim of the project that the solution developed under the activity can be used globally in a variety of mining environments.

The solution is being designed to meet the ICMM regulation for TSF monitoring. The collection of data from multiple sources and the associated classification of this data in terms of compliance and risk management ensures the solution will fit with the “good engineering practices for tailings management” as defined by the ICMM. Data is validated from its source and the system provides GDPR and ISO 27001 data security compliance.

Added Value:

In terms of automating mine TSFs, Petroleum can employ interferometric SAR in the analysis of TSFs tailings beachheads and general ground stability. This data when linked to GNSS referenced LIDAR and other terrestrial data offers a means of analysing live data and developing predictive models, which can be used to ascertain regulatory and environmental compliance.

• Increased Operational Efficiency: Protelum’s innovative data management platform creates better ways to manage, store and make sense of mining data. AI, machine learning and machine vision technology generates day-to-day data that can provide actionable insights in shorter time frames. Smart data and machine learning allows for better planning and resource management, and can be used to improve operational efficiency, production workflow and mine safety.

• Reduced Costs: Using the latest cutting-edge satellite and imaging technology provides the ability to manage the TSF locations without the need for cost-intensive ground truth inspections. By providing geoscientific images in a programmatic manner, both travel and inspection costs are reduced.

• Increased Sustainability: Mining can be an environmentally destructive process when managed incorrectly. EO and IoT data can aid the development of environmentally friendly mineral processing.

• Safety Ensured: Protelum can also be used to provide non-TSF metrics such as air quality, fire and explosion risks has been augmented by current spatial data visualization like 3D modelling, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (VR). They provide mine management with the ability to view a mine remotely, but as if they were onsite. This allows them to plan for any safety concerns by allowing managers to experience working in a mine or developing a new mine without being in the field.

Current Status:

The project commenced on 23 August 2022, with milestone #1 occurring on 28 February 2023.