Integrated Systems vs Communicated Systems in Mining

By Dr. Luis A. Martínez Tipe, PhD Director General & Principal Researcher, CAIDTech Originally published: July 18, 2016

In mining (and other fields) the word integration is a word like system; i.e., they have so many meanings and shades of gray the practitioner is never quite sure exactly how current mining technology is using the words in practice.  While trying to look for the best and simplest way of explaining how I see what the difference between a communicating (pseudo-integrated) system and an integrated system is, I realised that my children could be of great assistance because of their imagination (we were watching the Transformers cartoon). As a matter of fact, when I commented with them what I was thinking, they suggested me to check a specific transformer, i.e., “Devastator” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3rh7tRert0).

So, here is how I see and integrated systems summarised in the following figures (borrowing some of the transformer-devastator pictures).

Figure 1. Current (traditional) mining systems are what I call “Communicating Systems” which are composed of several processes that do specific tasks in isolation. In the figure, each process in the communicating system is represented by different mining machinery. These processes communicate very well via different I/O interfaces. Each process work/collect and process data in an isolated fashion providing isolated information about their task performance. This sometimes gives the appearance (or perception) that the system is integrated, which is not totally true, and I prefer to call it a pseudo-integrated system.

Figure 2. The system integration process is the art and science of facilitating available processes that connect or unify the many separate (isolated) process solutions into a system solution. To generate an integrated system we need to think first about the task objectives we would like the system to perform that cannot be done by the processes in isolation. Next we need to restructure the current processes in a different layout (architecture) where all of them interact forming part of a single entity-process to achieve the system purpose or task objective.

Figure 3. The challenging part of creating an integrated system is to see how to restructure the different processes available from different sciences in a way that all of them interact as a whole so it can handle the task objectives in a practical fashion. One way to tackle this is by building software engines that implement the integrated systems, and with user friendly Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and advanced visualization systems. Note that an integrated system does not need to re-invent new processes (unless necessary) but uses current ones in a different order/structure and is aided by processes from other fields, such as data analytics and optmisation procedures, among others. Although apparently a trivial process, it is in reality the difficult part and needs a lot of research and development (R&D).

Figure 4. Normally the tasks that integrated systems are aimed to solve are complex which raises a challenge. That is, the resulting integrated system needs to be practical and user friendly so it can be used without the need to have knowledge of advanced and complex science. This is certainly a nice challenge that the system creators/designers will face. Note that this will involve the participation of a team of engineers with knowledge in different sciences which will need to talk each other within the integrated system.

Figure 5. Once the integration process is finished the resulting “integrated system” will be another “beast” where the different processes will collect and process data from different sources and perform integrated analysis in order to deal with tasks that otherwise were not possible to do with a communication system (i.e., isolated processes tasks).

Figure 6. Some of the features that the new “Integrated System” will have are:

• Practical and user friendly;

• Able to deal with big volume of formatted/unformatted data;

• Able to uncover hidden information that is not normally perceptible to the human eye throughout visual reports and advanced charts;

• Easy to audit, repeat, and report;

• Be a platform for further R&D and improvement – i.e., it will evolve/be upgraded based on new challenges and needs;

• And much more, for sure.

Click in the link for an example of a complex system which can be represented by an Integrated System https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/some-comments-big-data-science-drones-open-pit-mining-martinez?trk=pulse_spock-articles .

Something important I forgot to mention is that when building Integrated Systems it is also important to have a lot of imagination to visualise the solutions to complex problems beyond traditional thinking (something I learned from my boys). Editor's note: This article was written in 2016. Since then, CAIDTech has developed and applied the probabilistic frameworks described here across multiple mine projects in Latin America and Australia, integrating geological variability, operational dynamics and economic uncertainty into a single quantitative model. Learn more at [caidtechnology.com]