Digital Twin Architecture for Mining Industry: Case Study of a Stacker Machine in an Experimental Open-Pit Mine

Abstract

Digitalization in mining industry has become an important component nowadays in order to improve the productivity, the efficiency while increasing the availability of machines and different equipment The use of digital twin as a feature in mining industry has shown promising results to deal with its multiple challenges such as maintenance, production, energy consumption. In this paper, a comparative study is presented of developed digital twins in different applications such as energy management, manufacturing, industrial and campus, the goal is to design a conceptual architecture of a proposed digital twin within presenting a case study of a stacker machine in the experimental open pit mine of Benguerir. This design presented by 4 layers: physical, Data pre-processing, Edge computing, and cloud data, the goal is to work on interactions between these layers to enhance the performance of different mining machines. The case study elucidates a practical result on Stacker machine used in mining industry simulating the mechanism and the automatism of this system. This developed digital twin will be used to simulate critical scenarios and see the behavior of the stacker components in order to optimize the usage of this machine increasing its availability and reliability.