ABB teams up with Enterprise Transformation Partners and UWA

ABB has announced a partnership with the Enterprise Transformation Partners (ETP) and the University of Western Australia (UWA) to digitalise Gold Fields Australia’s Granny Smith mine in Western Australia.

The collaboration will enable Gold Fields to connect and coordinate mine operators, workforce, equipment, and mining activities at Granny Smith in real time. The project willl help increase Granny Smith’s production throughput.

“To achieve the objective of a fully connected mine, we are working with ABB and ETP to build an integrated business process and system architecture that will enable visibility of operational activities in near real-time via automated information exchange between various mining systems,” says Michael Place, Gold Fields Australia technical service manager.

Furthermore, ABB has teamed up with UWA to launch its new Energy and Resources Digital Interoperability Industry 4.0 (ERDi i4.0) TestLab.

The TestLab will advance open process automation standards to digitalise Australian mines, the statement adds. It will allow for off-site laboratory testing at mines to test the efficiency of interoperability of the technology without disturbing mining activities.

“Industry 4.0 and digital transformation are huge opportunities for the Australian mining industry with automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) generating insights and accelerating greater productivity and efficiency," says Stuart Cowie, ABB Australia Industrial Automation Process Industries head.

“This underlines ABB’s commitment to ensuring Industry 4.0 concepts influence its product roadmaps into the future and demonstrates the significant value that can be delivered to customers through interoperability and automation across both processes and systems. It will give ABB valuable insights into digital transformation and Industry 4.0 concepts for mining,” he adds.

“Through our work with the ERDi TestLab, the OMS platform has become an even more powerful tool with reliable real-time access to operational data through ISA95 standardised messages.”

In August, ABB secured a 13.19 million contract to provide mine hoist systems to Newmont’s Tanami gold mine in Australia. In addition, ABB received a contract in July from Damen Shipyards to provide integrated power system package for the largest advanced diamond recovery vessel in the world.

This follows Gold Fields partnering with Aggreko in June 2018 to explore the possibility of introducing renewables at its Granny Smith gold mine.