In recent years, with the rapid development of new generation information technology, the integration process of digitalization, intelligence technology and mining has been accelerating. The construction of intelligent mines has become a hot topic of concern for the country, industry and enterprises. After rapid development in recent years, China's intelligent mining field has also made significant breakthroughs. From the supply of technology, to the transformation of enterprise demand cognition, and then to the implementation of practice, China's intelligent mining field has explored a path of digital transformation, intelligent construction, and the transformation of enterprises under the new kinetic energy transformation system. At the recently held 2023 China International Mining Conference Intelligent Mining Forum, experts and scholars from mining companies, universities, and technological innovation enterprises discussed the future development path of intelligent mining in China.

Zhan Kai, former Deputy General Manager of Beijing Mining and Metallurgy Technology Group Co., Ltd

The construction of intelligent mines should be combined with the actual situation of enterprises

The construction of intelligent mines is closely related to the development of the industry. Comparing the operation of the mining economy last year with the first quarter of this year, it can be seen that coal, gold, and other industries are all in a high operating stage. All indicators, whether production and sales volume, profit or fixed assets investment, have achieved rapid growth, providing a very good foundation for intelligent and unmanned mine construction.

The construction of intelligent mines is related to the overall requirements of China, the development of the industry in which the enterprise operates, and the development requirements of the enterprise itself. At present, the intelligent construction of coal mines is relatively good, but in non coal areas, the construction of intelligent mines such as metal, non-metal, building materials, and nuclear industries varies greatly. Especially the strategic minerals "four rare" (rare earth, rare earth, rare scattered, rare precious), although small, their importance is self-evident. In the future, there should be many personalized requirements for the construction of intelligent mines. Enterprises should develop towards automation, intelligence, digitization, and unmanned mining based on their own situation and needs. Intelligent mines, smart mines, and unmanned mines will definitely become a reality.

Chen Xiaowei, Deputy General Manager of Mining Division of China Enfi Engineering Technology Co., Ltd

The construction of intelligent mines is not simply a combination of intelligent systems

Intelligent mining construction can create a 1+1+N overall architecture intelligent control system. '1' is to build a control center that integrates production control, production management, and operation at the selection level, changing the drawbacks of previous decentralized control and improving management efficiency; "1" is to build a data middle platform based on the trinity of industrial Internet. Through modeling of maintenance data, measurement data, equipment and materials, the visualization of the whole process information can be realized. Including the digitization of the entire process, relying on big data analysis technology, artificial intelligence technology equipped with a full lifecycle digital twin system; N "refers to N applications developed around the data center, including automated and unmanned production systems, as well as the integration of massive data to form intelligent software application services.

The construction of intelligent mines is not simply a combination of intelligent systems, nor is it a simple application of intelligent equipment. The construction of intelligent mines should fully consider factors such as the effective integration of mining process systems, intelligent equipment configuration, and control systems. Only in this way can the construction effect of intelligent mines be guaranteed. For many managers of mining enterprises, it is necessary to equip a high-quality technical team that matches them. Refactoring the management process and architecture of the entire mine according to the standards of intelligent mining can ensure the smooth and efficient operation of the entire intelligent mine.

On site forum

Peng Ping'an, Associate Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at Central South University

Cognition, perception, and management

The architecture of intelligent mines has two dimensions. One is the architecture of intelligent mines from the perspective of business scenarios, where the business is mainly divided into production and management. The management team mainly includes technology management, enterprise management, and safety management; Another aspect is from a technical perspective, based on cloud, edge, and end architectures, data perception is achieved on the end. For mines, it means personnel, equipment, environment, etc. Implement computing and intelligent work at the edge, such as the existing intelligent ventilation equipment, intelligent operations, shovel loading and transportation, and achieve production management in the cloud.

Regarding the safety of intelligent mining production, it can be summarized in six words: cognition, perception, and management.

Cognition refers to how to improve people's level of safety awareness, and through VR related technologies, people can have more authentic experiences; Perception refers to achieving intelligent ventilation, on-demand ventilation, and safety disaster prediction for underground and open-pit environments. For cloud based microseismic monitoring platforms, comprehensive cloud based processing of disaster data is achieved, and corresponding data is automatically pushed to mine management personnel; Management and execution mainly adopt information technology to build a secure closed-loop management system, preventing risks from transforming into disasters.

Zhang Mingwei, Director of Mining and Metallurgical Solutions for Huawei's Mining Corps

Integrating artificial intelligence with the mining industry

The future smart mine architecture must evolve in the direction of industrial Internet architecture. Based on the biggest feature of the Internet architecture, all the underlying equipment and systems are connected. There are various networks in the smart mine field, such as remote driving, personnel positioning, vehicle positioning, remote control, etc. In the future, these networks will definitely be unified. The data needed in the future will be extracted and collected from production equipment and systems on the same platform, and a unified database will be established to extract data from it. Then, the data will be applied through an artificial intelligence platform to achieve the goal of unmanned or even unmanned operation.

Nowadays, the application of artificial intelligence big models has stored a considerable amount of data. But in order to promote the integration of big models with the mining field, data from the mining field is still needed to provide support. Traditional artificial intelligence big models are universal, and mining enterprises provide scenarios and data to combine with traditional artificial intelligence big models to establish a data integration model. Based on this, specific models can be developed and applied to various mining fields, such as unmanned driving and intelligent ore selection. Through practice, it can be seen that after the development of a small model, there is a 60% to 70% limit on its usage scenarios. However, when the accuracy of a large model is transferred to another scenario, only minor adjustments are needed to achieve over 90%. This is the greatest value that a large model brings.

There are two main applications of artificial intelligence big models in mining: visual big models and predictive big models. In the future, there will be multimodal large models and graph network multi model applications, which will be the main focus of large models in the future. I believe that through the application of artificial intelligence models, it will definitely help mines move towards intelligence more quickly.

Lead drafter of the "Code for Construction of Intelligent Mines" standard, Lv Tao

Constructing an intelligent mining system with ore flow characteristics

For mining enterprises, ore flow is like essential food for human survival. Ore flow includes resource exploration, planning and design, mining, lifting and transportation, stripping, transportation, crushing and screening, grinding and grading, sorting and processing, concentrate and tailings, comprehensive utilization, etc. It can be said that ore flow runs through the entire production process of the mine.

The construction of the entire ore flow system should also adopt platform based development technology. The platform can be mainly divided into data integration platform, centralized monitoring platform, control integration platform, analysis and decision-making platform, etc. Nowadays, large-scale systems often use platform based construction, and after system development, they need to be integrated. The key to integration is to have a common platform, which is a unified data platform and a unified zero code application development platform.

Reshaping the ore flow can be achieved through various technological means, such as optimizing the stripping ratio, mining plan, ore blending, transportation path, blasting charge, slope grinding ratio, beneficiation process parameters, chemical system, and recovery rate.

The potential space for the construction of intelligent mines in the future is enormous. However, as a very large system, enterprises alone cannot independently solve the existing problems in the construction of intelligent mines. It requires universities, research institutes, design institutes, as well as a large number of technological innovation enterprises and mining enterprises to work together to tackle the problem, in order to build China's mines into intelligent mines and maintain strong competitiveness in the future development process.