Dig_IT

The turnover of mining and quarrying in Europe reaches up to 224 billion Euros and has generated EUR 64.9 billion of value added, 1% of the non-financial business economy total. The rise of key enabling technologies and the urbanisation and industrialisation of emerging economies in combination with increase in population and living standards will continue to drive growing demand for raw materials. The need to extract raw materials in a profitable, environmentally sound, and safe way for both mining workforce and communities is driving the mining industry towards innovative approaches to transform operations. Even though Industry 4.0 offers a wide spectrum of solutions, and intelligent technologies to address respective challenges, the mining industry hesitates to adopt such innovative approaches when compared to downstream industries. In addition, the need for a human-centred, environmentally oriented and society-driven approach is emerging in developing Industrial Internet of Things technologies for mining. Dig_IT will address the needs of the mining industry to move forward towards a sustainable use of resources while keeping people and environment at the forefront of their priorities. In order to achieve that Dig_IT proposes the development of a smart Industrial Internet of Things platform (IIoTp) that will improve the efficiency and sustainability of mining operations by connecting cyber and physical systems. The platform will collect data from sensors at 3 levels: (i) human, (ii) assets, (iii) environment and will also incorporate both market real time and historical data. The impact of Dig_IT to the European Mining industry, but also the society itself, can be summarised in the following (with a horizon of 4 years after project ends): (i) increase of the mining efficiency by 17%, (ii) increased OEE for machines and loading by 20% and 18% respectively, (iii) 19% reduction of CO2eq, (iv) about 310 new jobs created and (v) over 28M EUR ROI for the consortium.

2020

2024