Enabling underground mining management for the Cloud with IoT ready sensors, smart contracts and the distributed capabilities of a Blockchain network.
Camila Carvajal Villamil, Valentina Casallas Chaves, Federico Estupiñán Carreño, Daniel Lozano Navas
The mining and materials industry is still one of the principal actors of our global economy. As expected, this industry faces some of the most complex challenges and those challenges are likely to evolve into deeper problematics to solve. As the industry outlook has deteriorated over time due to this and other complex issues, most mining companies have shelved or trimmed expansion plans and refocused on doing even more with less resources.
Of course, we can't ignore that this centuries-old industry differs from other industries in a wide variety of aspects, starting by the nature of the resource being mined, the conditions and mechanisms for any given extraction process as well as those other aspects that have been making operations difficult at the mining industry.
In an information-rich world, data has become a source of competitive advantage for businesses across industries, and mining is no exception. Despite this, mining organisations put less than 1 percent of their data to effective use not to mention that they are less productive as the time goes by.
Fortunately, digital and technology innovations that could transform key aspects of mining are now emerging and disruptive technologies can be integrated together to help mining executives to mitigate risk and oversee safer and more consistent operations.
Our solution leverages the power of hundreds of interconnected data sources that are constantly monitoring key aspects of the mine and its workers, in real time, and sending data to a Cloud based network that establishes bidirectional communication with every IoT device, to deliver device-to-cloud telemetry data that can be processed to understand the state of every mine’s device and worker’s measurable variables and conditions (like location, blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature), as well as an overall state of the mine’s conditions per WSN zone (Gas emissions rates, humidity, temperature, ambience and others).
Of course, the main reason to gather all of this data is to enable the organization to smartly manage and oversee their operations, even beyond the mine. For this matter, our solution takes advantage of the disruptive and industry changing potential of distributed ledgers of a Blockchain network, as well as a consensus mechanism called “Smart contract” to help mining organizations to make informed decisions, achieve high levels of compliance and take risk management to the next level.
So, how to understand our solution’s perspective regarding Blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies? Let’s start by giving Blockchain a simple explanation. At its most basic level, you can think of a Blockchain as a shared ledger for recording data transactions in a secure and verifiable way.
Two of the blockchain’s unique characteristics are that ledgers (or transaction logs) are distributed, which means that every involved party has an identical copy of the ledger and every time a new transaction is recorded, every ledger across the network gets updated. The second unique characteristic of a Blockchain network is that it’s cryptographically immutable, so every time that a new transaction goes inside the network, each involved party must agree that this transaction is valid through a consensus mechanism before updating their ledgers. This two unique characteristics allows any Blockchain network to transfer value in near real time without third parties involved.
This been said, our value proposition lies on the stipulation of the terms under which each data transaction is going to be made, using a consensus mechanism called a “Smart Contract” (first introduced with protocols like Ethereum or Corda), which is kind of a representation of a real contract, defining the terms and conditions under which a change to a ledger will be made.
At the mining industry, accountability, compliance and management play a key role, but those processes become even more challenging as more parties get involved with the overall operations of the mine.
From the mining process itself, all the way through verification, classification, transport and auditment, mining operations become involved with several parties and keeping track of all those moving parts for management and compliance turns out being a tricky challenge… until now.
Our smart contract approach is defined in such a way that establish contracts with defined terms for each involved party (including sensors), codifying this terms for each group of actors inside the mine’s On-premise network to link and track data from involved sensors along every process step, verifying in near real time that the contractual terms have been met (or not) and then writing those results to the ledger.
In essence, what an Smart Contract managed process allows us to do is to keep track of things as they happen by using the Blockchain as a Single Source of Truth, enabling mining organizations to detect and correct issues immediately as well as oversimplifying the audit process by removing trough automation and cryptographical immutability any potential process checking overhead.
Let's clarify our solution’s outlook with two little but applicable examples. Across every mine’s daily operations, huge amounts of data are generated each second. This data can be collected by a wide variety of IoT enabled devices and then transferred to the Cloud, where we can work with it. With a Smart Contract in place defining, for example, the terms and conditions for safe toxic gas levels inside the mine, we’re enabling supervisors and auditors to immediately get notified about any irregularity regarding this levels to address compliance and risk issues as they happen and to optimise the audit process by relying on the Blockchain’s immutability characteristic we discussed early on this document.
Another good example is an Smart contract in place to regulate the miner’s optimal work conditions. This can be accomplished with a pretty straightforward approach as the Smart Contract takes advantage of the power of simple smart and wearable devices that have integrated-by-default sensors enabled to gather and exchange data in order to help keeping track of several key aspects of any employee inside the mine, at any given point in time. This allows supervisors, auditors and executives to constantly monitor each process at the mine and to determine which contractual terms have been met or not.
Among other data sources, the data we’re leveraging through our proposed Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) includes, but not limited to, miners’ blood pressure levels and safe heart rate ranges, toxic gas exposure (CH4, CO, H2S, SO2, NO2, NH3) levels, respirable dust rates, employees Geo-positional tracking, altitude and others, as well as environmental variables like atmospheric and negative pressure, or local temperature.
To address connectivity requirements, our solution is going to be built in accordance with adequate protocols, interconnecting actors to the Internet through radio frequency identification (RFID).
The mine’s on-premise network must rely on information sensing device networks where every sensor (node) gets connected to a non-central authority (Gateway) for informational exchange and communication with their back-end hosted in the cloud.
Reliable connectivity is vital to our project. As a data-driven solution, our entire infrastructure relies upon the organisations’ ability to collect and transmit data to the Cloud so that all historical datasets gathered are at their disposal and can be processed, analysed and even used to predict outcomes through Machine Learning, allowing the organization to informedly decide on the best course of action.