The intelligent mine solution powered by 5G and the industrial Internet that was jointly developed by Huawei and Shaanxi Coal Industry Co., Ltd. (Shaanxi Coal Company) hit its one-year milestone, marking a full year of continuous operations. The solution has leveraged technologies like 5G, cloud computing, and AI, as well as related digital applications, to significantly improve production efficiency and operational safety at the mines of Shaanxi Coal Company. This makes a powerful case for intelligent upgrade for the global mining industry, and provides a reference for applying the industrial Internet in other industries.
The solution has integrated ICT technologies into every step of the coal mining process to eliminate silos and enable data sharing. This supports intelligent collaboration between safety assurance, production, operation, energy conservation, environmental protection, and other systems, and has improved efficiency during geological exploration, tunneling, mining, and more. The solution is also the first of its kind to use an industrial Internet platform with a three-level architecture of Shaanxi Coal Company, its mine subsidiaries, and the coal mines themselves. This platform has enabled collaborative management and control, intelligent sensing, and efficient decision making.
Xu Jun, CTO of Huawei's Mine BU, said that Huawei has worked with Shaanxi Coal Company's Hongliulin Coal Mine and Xiaobaodang Coal Mine to develop new practices and applications that meet the specific requirements of coal production. In this process, Huawei has leveraged the expertise it has built up in 5G, AI, cloud, big data, and other technologies, as well as its capability to integrate global resources. This partnership has created a new benchmark of intelligent mines for the industry. In particular, the intelligent mine solution can build virtual mines that act as the digital twins of physical mines underground, generating greater value with the massive amounts of mining data in a safer and more efficient way.
As a result, the Hongliulin Coal Mine now has 18% fewer workers working underground. In addition, 97.7% of its mine faces now support intelligent mining, and intelligent management has been made possible for the underground mine face using 5G video splicing and video calls. More than 2,700 sets of equipment at the mine are now interconnected using unified data standards, with 170 million pieces of data streamed to the data lake every day. This data has been used to create over 100 digital models. This data can also be used to inform production and operation decision making and develop new digital applications using "zero-code" development tools.
The Xiaobaodang Coal Mine has also used 5G and other technologies to enable intelligent mining processes, equipment, and management, significantly improving operational safety and production efficiency. The mine's underground workforce is reduced by 42%. Key facilities in the mine, such as the underground water pump rooms and substations, have achieved intelligent, unattended operations, thanks to machine patrol inspection and video-based collaboration. In terms of production safety, environmental monitoring devices are able to autonomously detect and give out warnings related to gas buildup, fires, flooding, ventilation issues, and geological events, and enable real-time data interconnection. This can support more informed decision making to greatly improve safety management at the mine.