TEMPLATE FOR AUTHORS FOR THE PREPARATION OF ABSTRACTS TO BE SUBMIIITED
TO IMPC 2016
ABSTRACT
Production Optimization – Leveraging Automation beyond process control.
Mining operations generate an enormous amount of data that is difficult to organize, analyze and act on. These data
require an extremely broad range of experts to investigate and manage the cross-disciplinary information. The data
collects in paper files, diverse databases, historians, stand-alone applications, and excel files. This collection of
sources represents everything from monthly, weekly, or daily inputs to real-time feeds or sporadic unscheduled entries.
With the operational complexities ever increasing and fewer engineers per mine, an efficient operation is becoming
more and more challenging. Engineers are typically burdened with data collection, clean up, and administrative efforts
leaving very limited time for actual engineering assessment and/or optimization analysis. Given the time constraints
optimization becomes limited to the analysis of equipment uptime through existing field automation systems. A great
portion of the field data is tucked away in historians seldom reaching those engineers who might leverage the data to
look at the efficiency and performance of mines or facilities across the asset.
Few mine operators have the time or budget to re-architect their operations data collection or data management
practice, so solutions must enable improvements without requiring expensive or time-consuming projects to implement
a completely new system. This presentation highlights examples where the aforementioned challenges are addressed
using a solution framework designed to enable: 1) data integration and connectivity, 2) monitoring and opportunity
recognition, and 3) engineering workflow automation. The initiative extends the concepts and success proven in the
automation market segment to all disciplines across the mine operations.
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