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UWA ERDi i4.0 TestLab – RPMGlobal Joins TestLab Collaborative Efforts

Published 27/7/2020

Co-founders of The University of Western Australia’s (UWA) Energy & Resources Digital Interoperability Industry 4.0 (ERDi i4.0) Testlab Enterprise Transformation Partners (ETP), along with UWA, are pleased to announce that they have agreed to terms with global mining software and advisory company RPMGlobal, with respect to collaborating on a Proof of Concept 1 (POC1) of the AMIRA P1208 Project.

Related Article: ERDI TestLab Kicks Off First Major Industry Sponsored Project - AMIRA P1208

RPMGlobal has long supported and contributed to the enhancement of interoperability standards such as ISA-95 together with the application of these standards within their suite of enterprise mining software applications.

As part of this collaboration, RPMGlobal will make available their enterprise mine planning and scheduling software and services to support POC 1 of the AMIRA P1208.

Project sponsors will benefit from witnessing demonstrations that will showcase schedules being published from RPMGlobal’s software via standard based messages and being received by Fleet Management Systems (FMS) and Operations and Material Tracking Systems.

Furthermore, the RPMGlobal software will receive actuals information from both the FMS and the Operations and Material Tracking Systems in real-time. This will enable rapid rescheduling when production trends outside of predefined tolerances.

RPMGlobal have been contributing to the ISA-95 standards for many years now, having two active members on the ISA-95 committee and have also realised the value of utilising the standards as a basis for RPMGlobal’s “product to product” information exchange.

“The UWA ERDi i4.0 TestLab is excited to have RPMGlobal on board, having also recently worked with the RPMGlobal team in integrating their software with other ISA-95 aligned solutions in production at an open pit mine with great success” said ETP Managing Director John Kirkman.

Involvement in the P1208 Project will enable RPMGlobal to showcase their software utilising these standards to be integrated with other software products as well as utilising realistic simulated data sets at the scale of the sites used by the AMIRA P1208 Sponsors.

The goal of the scheduling process is to determine the optimal schedule, to execute for the next shift within the context of the subsequent shifts/weeks and upper level plans, to hit targets.

By definition, the optimal schedule is only valuable if executed accordingly and as such it is critical for the execution teams to have access to the schedule information in such a way that they can use it to dispatch and manage the execution of the work in accordance with the schedule.

If assumptions that the schedule was built upon change during execution (i.e. an excavator breaks down or actuals are tracking outside of acceptable tolerances) then the scheduler needs to be immediately made aware. The immediacy of the notification enables a reschedule to be run without delay in order to determine how to optimally manage the impacts of that change within the context of the state of the mine at that time, and then publish that schedule to the execution team.

Enabling software to reliably and automatically exchange this information enables greater operational performance (through reduction of lost opportunity) and also enables software vendors to focus R&D efforts on enhancing and automating their optimiser capabilities, thus delivering further benefits to their customers over time.

RPMGlobal’s CTO Paul Beesley says it is a great initiative to be a part of. “RPMGlobal has been heavily invested in working towards improving industry integration standards for many years and it is great to be involved in a project with likeminded organisations to help realise that goal which we believe has the opportunity to deliver enormous value for the industry”. 

Further P1208 POC 1 software vendors will be announced in the near future.

About RPM Global

RPMGlobal Holdings Limited (ASX: RUL) [RPMGlobal] is a global leader in the provision and development of mining software solutions, advisory services and professional development. With history stretching back to 1968, RPMGlobal has been trusted by mining companies of all sizes and commodities to support their growth. Our global expertise has been achieved over the past 50 years through our work in over 125 countries and our approach to the business of mining being strongly grounded in economic principles.