26 March 2021
Publication: Mobile Equipment Open Data, Report on Industry Challenges and Next Steps
The Global Mining Guidelines Group (GMG) has published Mobile Equipment Open Data: A Report on Industry Challenges and Next Steps. This report summarizes the results of workshops and individual outreach within the GMG community throughout 2020 and captures key areas of agreement, recurring themes, and possible future work on the topic.
Open data from mobile equipment can enable mining companies to make data-driven decisions that maximize equipment safety, utilization, and performance and foster innovation and continuous improvement. While a key topic within GMG for many years, the community has identified a need to refocus and reinvigorate effort on it.
“For the past couple of years, GMG has been hearing from its members that this topic is an important concern for them, especially within the context of increasing digitalization,” says Andrew Scott, GMG Vice-Chair, Working Groups and Principal Innovator at Symbiotic Innovations. “The challenge has been getting to the heart of the problems that companies are facing so that GMG can provide value and develop guidance where it is needed.”
Participants identified the lack of common language and a need to better communicate and describe open data as the highest priority challenge. Two potential projects to address this challenge emerged.
The first is to identify, define, and prioritize key open data use cases to provide context for different users. This context can enable better awareness onsite and improved communications between key stakeholders about different types of information.
The second is to identify existing standards and protocols and their applications and limitations within a mining context, which can help users understand their options for standardization without prescribing an approach.
While this report is an important step towards getting to the heart of the challenges, this remains a complex topic and there are still gaps in understanding and areas requiring further agreement. This report can be used as a tool to generate further discussion. “As a global multi-stakeholder organisation, GMG is well placed to enable the conversations to overcome this concern,” says Scott.
The next step will be for the results to be brought back to the GMG Data Access and Usage/Interoperability Working Group to continue the discussion and consider and prioritize the potential projects among related work.
For further information, please contact info@gmggroup.org
