Management Systems for Future Fleets
Autonomy is a powerful tool for driving productivity and efficiency in mine fleets and, if done
right, can offer substantial cost reductions. E&MJ explores the path from FMS to AHS.
By Carly Leonida, European Editor
Greg Lanz, vice president for business development at Modular Mining, explained to E&MJ: “Another significant factor in FMS improvements is the proliferation of automation. Mines leveraging this technology are better able to reduce or eliminate human error, increase predictability within workflows, and decrease the frequency of personnel working in extreme conditions or hazardous environments.
“At present, utilization of automated technologies varies across the industry. At opposite ends of the spectrum are mines with little to no automation, and mines operating fully autonomous truck fleets. Situated between the two extremes are those using semiautomated and operator-assist technologies.” The majority of open-pit mines globally use an FMS — DISPATCH, Wencomine and MineStar are just a few examples (there are many more available on the market). These are geared primarily towards the optimization of manned vehicle fleets, and many offer remote operation or semi-autonomous functions for equipment like dozers, drills and excavators.
Haulage is currently the only part of the load and haul process that can be fully automated and to run a truck fleet, or part of one, autonomously requires an autonomous haulage system (AHS). Currently, there are three commercially available, with more in the pipeline. Caterpillar (Command for Hauling) and Komatsu (FrontRunner) are the leaders with solutions primarily targeted at their own fleets, the Cat AHS has been deployed on to Komatsu 930E trucks, too. Combined, these OEMs have deployed more than 400 autonomous trucks.
Hot on their heels is ASI Mining with its Mobius third-party OEM agnostic solution. Hitachi Construction Machinery (HCM) and Wenco Mining Systems are currently installing their first commercial scale AHS at Whitehaven’s Maules Creek mine in Australia following a proof-of-concept trial at Meandu in Queensland, and BELAZ also has AHS trials ongoing.
It’s hard to beat the cost and effi- ciency improvements that AHSs can offer but, despite nearly 35 years of research and testing into their operation (the precursor to AHS was a multi-truck deployment in the USA in the 1970s prior to GPS being widely available), commercial-scale deployments are still relatively thin on the ground. Fewer still are mines that are getting the full benefit from their investment in these technologies. Success with an autonomous fleet requires far more than just new software and hardware; a full transformation is required from mine planning to company culture with commitment at every level of the business, and change on this scale can be off putting, daunting even, for some companies.
But, until we get to grips with AHS usage and learn to optimize their performance, it will be difficult to expand full autonomy to other parts of the mine, particularly equipment with more complex roles, and incorporate them into otherwise autonomous operations.
Interest is Growing
As markets become tougher and mines
more expensive to build and run, it’s
likely that mining companies will look
increasingly to autonomy as a way of
driving efficiency and productivity in
their operations.
It has been nearly 15 years since the
first commercial deployment of an AHS
— Komatsu’s FrontRunner at Codelco’s
Gabriela Mistrel operation in Chile —
and, since then, our experience and understanding
of the technology, as well
as its capabilities and limitations, have advanced significantly; to the point
where some mining companies are now
leveraging it to achieve nearly a 30%
reduction in hourly operating costs.
The success of companies such as Fortescue Metals Group, Rio Tinto and BHP with AHSs is spurring others on to evaluate autonomous haulage for their own operations. While the largest and most successful AHS implementations are currently at iron ore operations in Australia’s Pilbara, many oil sands operations are now looking into converting their manned fleets to autonomous operation too. Suncor Energy (Calgary, Alberta) spearheaded the use of autonomous haulage in the oil sands in 2018 with its phased implementation of the FrontRunner AHS, set to roll out over six years across multiple sites. Ukrainian iron-ore producer, Ferrexpo, announced an installation in late 2019. Teck’s Highland Valley Copper operation in Canada is trialing autonomous haulage, and so is Barrick at its Arturo JV in Nevada. Whitehaven’s Maules Creek mine in New South Wales will be the first coal operation to run an AHS once its new HCM-Wenco system is fully operational, and Newmont recently approved an investment for Boddington in Western Australia.
Many mining companies are now planning new mines in a way that will allow autonomous haulage to be used from day one too. “This is a much easier path than the conversion of an existing mine with manned trucks,” said Andrew Pyne, CEO at Wenco. “Making the transition from operators in trucks to an autonomous fleet is very challenging. Many mining companies have completed economic and engineering evaluations required to potentially migrate their operations toward autonomous haulage. There are, however, significant barriers to adoption and, in some cases, it’s unachievable due to technological barriers, barriers in terms of the social impact of job losses, supplier and engineering challenges, and of course the CAPEX requirements to make the transition. This is why the adoption rate has been quite slow.”
The Interoperability Challenge
One of those barriers is the prevalence
of mixed OEM fleets on many mine sites
and the use of different operational
technologies including FMSs. Many of
these OT systems must be replaced as
they aren’t interoperable with current
AHSs and, likewise, the trucks.
According to the 2019 report “Accessing
the Fast and Furious Pace of
Autonomy to Transform Mining” by
Clareo and TWIN, interoperability and
open architecture will be key in allowing
more widespread adoption of autonomy
in mining and, ultimately, to the creation
of the fully autonomous mine site.
“An open and interoperable technology
system is one whose interfaces
are completely understood to work with
other products or systems, at present or
in the future, in either implementation
or access, without restrictions. They
enable a plug-and-play approach with
different systems and are often based
upon a standard,” the companies explain
in the report.
While groups like GMG and AMIRA are working toward developing universal standards for autonomous mining technologies, they have yet to emerge, and so some technology providers are engaged in tackling some of the barriers toward the adoption of AHS systems. Wenco, together with its parent company HCM is working to design solutions that comply with ANSI/ISA-95 and ISO standards for autonomous interoperability. “Wenco embarked on its ‘open system’ initiative many years ago and, in that time, we have continued to build upon our system integration capabilities,” Pyne said. “We share actionable information with numerous systems both horizontally across the mining value chain and vertically into ERP systems and other IT platforms.”
Wenco started with an open database and published APIs and has expanded to features such as a unified alarm system that allows third-party systems to show data on Wenco onboard displays. Wencomine can also share the GNSS data that it collects with other systems onboard, and there are other functions that help to reduce the total cost of ownership and increase the value of the data by increasing its accessibility. Beyond particular functional sets though, the company has embarked on a much grander interoperability vision. “To execute on IIoT and the vision of Mining 4.0, vendors need to have interoperability and data intelligence solutions that can operate across the customer’s end-to-end mining process,” Pyne said. “In support of that, a Wenco executive is currently convening a new ISO standards subcommittee group that allows the command and control orchestration of autonomous fleets while sharing that information back into customers’ existing infrastructure. In other words, enabling autonomous fleet solutions to be able to work with any FMS.”
Both companies are strongly committed to this approach. In fact, during the 2019 CIM conference, Hideshi Fukumoto, chief technology officer for HCM and chairman of Wenco, said publicly: “We will champion the enabling of new entrants to autonomy. Customers should have the choice to use whomever they desire. These may be vendors with autonomous technology but who may not have experience in mining, or their own fleet management systems like Wenco. These new vendors should be able to participate without being locked out of a closed silo approach that is more designed for the benefit of the OEM vendor than the customer.”
Pyne added: “We are already working with numerous mining companies and a few non-traditional autonomous vehicle mining systems, leveraging our open platform approach. We firmly believe this will enable next generation technology to emerge and facilitate autonomy to become more accessible to an increased number of mining companies.”
Managing Change
At present, if a mine wishes to convert
its manned truck fleet to autonomous
operation, and, if the FMS it uses across
the mine site isn’t compatible with an
AHS (i.e., the Cat MineStar FMS is
compatible with Cat Command for Hauling
AHS, Modular Mining’s DISPATCH
system is compatible with Komatsu’s
FrontRunner AHS etc.), then it has to
switch FMS as well. This makes the implementation
process far more costly
and time consuming, and change management
tricky for staff.
Newmont has said publicly that this was one of the biggest challenges in the mine’s decision to switch to an AHS. Changing a FMS is not an easy task, even without autonomy, and running the two in parallel will be a major undertaking. And this is not a one-off situation: FMG also switched out the FMS at its Cloudbreak operation in the Pilbara as part of the move to autonomy, as did Imperial Oil at its operations in Canada.
Speaking of change… an AHS is often thought of as a FMS for autonomous trucks, however, consultant Richard Price gives a more accurate and holistic description in his 2017 article “Autonomous Haulage Systems — the Business Case” for AusIMM Bulletin. “There is no industry standard defi- nition of an AHS; it is referred to as the people, technological devices, infrastructure and software that combine to create a system allowing off-highway haul trucks to operate without truck drivers” he states. People are the key component here. Company culture and willingness to change business processes and systems in order to make the most of the technology underpins every other aspect in the successful planning and execution of an AHS project.
“When transitioning to an AHS environment, mines need to institute a cultural transformation,” Nassauer said. “Mines cannot continue to think and act in the same manner as for conventional operation; the autonomous environment requires a more disciplined mindset. Overcoming this barrier requires a great deal of effort, training, and determination by employees at all levels and in all roles across the board. Being ready for change as an organization is the starting point; choosing an experienced technology partner is key to a successful transformation.”
Ben Miller, principal consultant at Autonomous Correct, agreed, “There are mines and operations that are ready for autonomy, and there are those that are not,” Miller said. “When you go out and assess a site, use of a FMS is a very good indicator of that mine’s ability to embrace that transfer of human decision over to an automated system. “Companies that are reliant on a lot of human decision-making in their processes are going to struggle. A mine which is very committed to use of its FMS and doesn’t manually assign trucks using it is more likely to successfully deploy an AHS.”
Of course, a change as fundamental as autonomy requires a lot of planning and formal design from the mine engineering department too, from material extraction to the haul road network design, without forgetting the coordination of large equipment tramming from one dig location to a new one. “An AHS fleet does not have a human brain on each truck that can compensate for what is requested versus what was intended,” Pyne said. “The system will blindly obey requests and does not interpret what people meant. It just executes what it’s requested to do. This also means that the system won’t always pivot and redeploy the trucks when reality does not go according to plan.”
These limitations do not apply to the Komatsu AHS, however. Integration of the DISPATCH FMS’ optimization logic in the FrontRunner system makes it possible for autonomous trucks to respond to situational changes in real time, and redeploy in the same manner as trucks in a crewed fleet. Because AHSs can provide so much operational data and the systems involved can’t operate without clear directives, all and any planning flaws or propagation of these plans in the operational flow are exposed very rapidly. “If mines can keep their current FMS and use an interoperability layer like ISO-23725, then they can realize the benefit of an AHS much faster with a lower cost of deployment,” Pyne added. “That approach allows miners to keep all the integration of material movement, maintenance, financials and reporting intact without redesigning and reintegrating each interface with the new AHS. They also won’t have to retrain all their staff on a new FMS.”
Better Communications
Another crucial piece of the puzzle is
the communications network that a mine
uses and its data transfer capabilities.
Nassauer said that LTE has been
working its way into mainstream adoption
at many of Komatsu’s AHS sites.
“This has brought about new levels
of stability and provided tools that allow
us to tightly manage security and
assure a degree of service previously
unobtainable with Wi-fi,” he said. “We
are keeping a close watch on the emerging
5G technology. It has the potential
to enable massive instrumentation and
analytics and open up as-yet undiscovered
avenues for product improvement
and downstream innovation.”
Pyne stated otherwise though: “I don’t believe [5G] will affect the performance of FMSs or the next generation of AHSs much,” he said. “Better communication technology will provide lower cost of ownership, which may yield more deployments if the ROI is more positive. It will also allow the use of more devices that produce data. This can further be analyzed to build better models and help optimize the mine’s operations “We predict that AHS technology will become more sophisticated and rely less on real-time, mine-wide communications as the technology matures, and enable new innovative entrants to provide next-generation AHS solutions. So, AHS performance will grow less dependent on 5G or low latency communication as time goes by.”
From Ultra Class to Swarms
Nuances aside, the benefits that AHSs
can deliver when done right are undoubtable.
The technology also plays
into some of the wider environmental
goals many mining companies have.
“Autonomous haulage balances the
needs of societal growth with the natural
resources required to achieve it,”
Nassauer said. “On a per-ton basis, AHS
operations have a reduced carbon footprint
through increased fuel efficiency
and lowered CO2 emissions, produce
less waste, and consume resources in a
more responsible manner.”
Caterpillar has also gone down this route. The company announced in April it has validated Fluidmesh Network’s wireless technology to improve networking capabilities for users of its MineStar Command solutions for hauling and dozing. The Fluidmesh solution, transmitting at 5 GHz end-to-end, uses artificial intelligence algorithms and dual-polarity antennas to improve data transmission in challenging environments. Fluidmesh is currently being acquired by Cisco, which provides Wi-finetworks for many of Caterpillar’s AHS deployments.
Better V2V communication will eventually allow the use of large fleets of smaller, fully autonomous trucks like Volvo’s HX2, Scania’s AXL or Komatsu’s Innovative Autonomous Haulage Vehicle — cabless trucks capable of operating in a swarm-like fashion, redeploying themselves immediately in response to changes in the mine plan or operating conditions.
“The reign of the ultra-class mining equipment will likely become a legacy of the current paradigm,” Pyne told E&MJ. “In the autonomy paradigm, the economics that drive fleet decisions are very different. That does not mean current mines will change their profile of haul trucks and loading units, but new sites will not naturally default to the same ultra-class size units. “We also predict that the autonomy trend will diversify and start to include other ancillary vehicles. As we know, drills are also widely automated and we’re going to start seeing, very soon, fully autonomous water carts, dozers and eventually even shovels and excavators in time. We see a logical step toward some of this spread of autonomy will be via teleremote control of some machines, particularly loading units.”
It’s worth remembering that, though impressive and seemingly “high tech,” haulage is actually one of the simpler parts of the load and haul process to automate. The tasks trucks perform are repetitive and their range of functions minimal. The more complex the role a piece of equipment is and the more decision- making involved in its tasks, the harder it is to fully relinquish control of it to an autonomous system and achieve optimal performance safely. Though companies like Rio Tinto and BHP are working on developing fully autonomous mine sites in the Pilbara, we are still a way off of the “holy grail,” and some question whether it will ever be possible to fully eliminate humans from mines given the necessity of maintenance crews. As such, the shift toward increasing autonomy will likely concentrate mining and operational knowledge in a few individuals working in cooperative teams. New ideas will likely come at a slower pace, but will be much more widely applied as the software is updated throughout AHS deployments.
In essence, the autonomy shift is indisputable. However, the paradigm of closed systems has to change to make the technology more widely accessible, and for the industry, as a whole, to take the next steps toward building “mines of the future.”