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From my interactions with various stakeholders, I've encountered the following:
- Cost of the initial investment does not make financial sense on the ground. The result is that these initiatives are driven from the top down which then drowns out the operational requirements, putting the cart before the horse. The result is that ROI is not seen due to poor implementation and mining companies shy away from such initiatives.
- There are skills gaps in the mining sector in many areas, including data analysis. This is a problematic barrier to entry and also give the false perception that AI will be replacing jobs
- Getting data from the face to a processing store is problematic in most mining environments due to lack of connectivity or poor connectivity.
- Local legislation on data privacy and complex licensing with third party services
- A integration issues between connected devices, most provides and OEMs have closed source systems and are not willing to share critical application interface controls
Like everything in the mining sector, new technologies take time to implement and need satisfy operational and functional requirements first.
Thank you Dale. Valid points - Your last two bullet points are particularly relevant to our work. In my view, H&S data and analytics must be open to everyone - with no IP restrictions. One would like to think that some OEMs are willing to share data that can save future lives and prevent disasters. Unfortunately, this remains an issue, Fred.
I think the issue is that OEMs are under the impression that they need to share "all" of their information for abstraction. This is clearly not the case and they need to have a ground up approach to these type of problems. From my perspective, it's about the requirement from the operational side of the mine. The problem that needs to be solved and being able to tie that in with the available data points
Dale, apologies for the belated response. I am very happy to read your view on this, because there is value for OEMs upon sharing good information when it matters - especially when it affect's health, safety and productivity. I see it as a marketing opportunity that demonstrates system functionality and not parting with sensitive IP when reports are shared responsibly. It would be unfair to the OEM if methodology, process and algorithms are shared. Fred