HIGH PROFILE
Open and interoperable
Tying in with its announcement on advancing Hitachi’s
open and interoperable partner ecosystem for
autonomous mining, Paul Moore spoke with Wenco
International Mining Systems’ CEO, Andrew Pyne, and
Eric Winsborrow, EVP Corporate Strategy, to get an insight
into this groundbreaking step forward in giving miners
more fundamental choice as part of their autonomy pathway
Q Are you the first to offer such an open platform?
A Earlier generations of mining technology were
often characterised by binary file structures and
as such much of the data being produced and
analysed was really just available at a tactical
level within mining organisations. More recently
mining companies have been demanding a more
open approach to data, so this potentially
valuable data is available to support better
decision making in the dynamic and uncertain
mining operations environment. It’s our
realisation of this requirement that is the driving
how we are approaching our technology
decisions. We also appreciate that much of the
data is contained within this earlier generation of
technology, so we are also very focused on
enabling the extraction and interrogation of that
data to support decision making. For example, the
first generation of autonomous solutions were
architected at a time when there wasn’t so much
focus on the operational technologies from the
senior decision makers in mining companies and
as such the need for openness wasn’t prioritised.
The environment has changed, hence our open
approach is supporting this new environment. We
can’t claim to be the first, as we know much of the
newer generation of technology is being
developed following this same data openness
technology philosophy. Where we believe we have
some uniqueness is in respect of our longevity
and experience of offering fleet management,
safety, asset health and material movement
solutions integrated into a customer’s
environment the way Hitachi and Wenco have
been doing. Our customers are asking them to
work with us to help give them that operational
experience and provide integration into the
customer’s existing infrastructure. We view these
special-purpose platforms as part of our
Ecosystem of partners to help deliver value to
customers. They can’t do it on their own, as there
is much to learn when integrating with mining
customers and their existing non-autonomous
operations. We can help their solution better
integrate with the customer’s operations and
become part of the bigger end-to-end solution.
Q Does this mean that any mine deploying this
new technology will be able to use any existing
autonomous equipment irrespective of vendor,
and even if using slightly older retrofitted
autonomous machines?
A That is the intention, but we will be dealing with
significant legacy technologies so we’ll need to
work with customers and other technology
providers to enable that outcome. We are offering
Andrew Pyne
Eric Winsborrow
a new technology horizon that moves beyond the
closed approach that some OEM vendors who still
require a full re-deployment of fleet management
and other operations systems in order to make
their autonomy technology work. The vendors
who want to leverage the Solution Linkage
platform and approach will need to also embrace
open standards, such as the ISO standard that is
currently being developed to support open
autonomy. (ISO Technical Committee TC82,
subcommittee 8). Some customers are already
working with Hitachi and Wenco to integrate new
autonomous haulage vendors into their existing
infrastructure. By supporting the burgeoning ISO
standards, this integration will become even easier.
Q Would use of Solution Linkage require that the
customer switch to a Wenco FMS system?
A No, and in fact philosophically that runs
completely contrary to our approach. Decisions
that are driven by any variables that are not
primarily designed to support the miner is the old
closed approach to technology utilisation. For
example, the first generation of autonomy
systems that are a very good example of this
closed OEM approach for autonomy is precisely
what we are trying to help the customer move
beyond. The customer has invested millions of
dollars and years integrating their current FMS
into their technology framework to support their
business operations and procedures. They
should be able to use what they
already have, and not be forced to
adopt new FMS systems that are
only built for the autonomous
system of a single OEM. Of
course, the Solution Linkage
platform leverages the open
architecture of technologies such
as Wenco’s FMS, but the focus is
providing the capabilities to allow
an autonomy vendor without
those capabilities to integrate into
a customer’s existing FMS and
mining operations.
Q Once others also offer an “OEM
agnostic” interoperable solution
for surface mining, there will
effectively be competition on who
50 International Mining | MAY 2019