Designing a Network Based System for Delivery of Remote Mine Services

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and analysis of a network-based system designed to deliver remote mining engineering services, addressing limitations of existing remote collaboration tools in the mining industry.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a remote mining engineer and conducts a requirements analysis to guide the design of an effective remote service delivery system.

Findings

Identified key functional requirements for remote mining engineering services.

Characterized existing remote collaboration technologies and their limitations.

Outlined future directions for designing and prototyping the network system.

Abstract

There is a great body of work in the areas of tele-assistance/tele-collaboration offering novel and effective ways to improve collaboration between personnel located at a remote mine site and off-site personnel located in major metropolitan areas. Much of this work involves the use of high-bandwidth communications or targeted sensory experiences using large format displays. There are also existing remote access technologies but these suffer from limited functionality (providing text, voice, video or one-way desktop sharing), are often poorly supported in the security-conscious corporate environment and require complicated set up processes. There is currently no singular piece of remote collaboration technology that is suitable for the delivery of high-quality planning and scheduling services to clients at a mining site from a remote operating centre. In response to this issue, as part of a research and technology development effort between CSIRO and a mining engineering firm, we have developed a concept of remote mining engineer (RME) and conducted a functional requirements analysis for delivering mining engineering services to mine sites remotely. Based on the obtained requirements, a further study was performed to characterise existing technologies and to identify the scope for future work in designing and prototyping a network based system for RME. We report on the method and findings of this study in this paper.