Unlocking the Full Potential of Mobile Equipment Telemetry in Mining

Modern mine mobile equipment carries an on-board network of sensors and a sophisticated machine management system, yet most of that data never reaches the people who could act on it. This joint whitepaper from Integration Objects and XPS - A Glencore Company explains how mobile equipment telemetry in mining can be captured, secured and turned into decision-making information for performance monitoring, machine integrity assurance and advanced maintenance practices.

The paper frames two classes of fleet now operating together: traditional diesel internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and newer battery electric vehicles (BEV), the latter carrying a Battery Management System that monitors battery integrity and safety parameters as well as supply. The operator sees a subset of this on the vehicle HMI; the significant remaining data sits in the machine management system, unexploited.

At Glencore Sudbury Integrated Nickel Operations, a new BEV fleet at the Craig Mine Onaping Depth Project created exactly this problem, with two challenges: making the data available in an organised, reliable way inside a cybersecure architecture, and transforming raw data volume into decisions. After an extensive search for global products, XPS selected Integration Objects and the SIOTH® (Smart IoT Highway) platform to build the telemetry data handling environment.

The solution section documents the end-to-end data flow. Equipment publishes over CAN bus to data loggers; MQTT-compliant loggers publish to an MQTT broker, while non-MQTT loggers route via an OEM server that converts to MQTT. MQTT was written into the BEV purchasing agreements as a requirement. Data crosses into the DMZ where SIOTH® receives it at the master node, cleanses it, and orchestrates delivery to final destinations in the IT domain; SQL Server, PI historian, data lakes, cloud services and, in some cases, a SCADA platform for real-time supervision, alarming and control. The platform boundary runs from the Wi-Fi and underground cellular (LTE) network through to the SQL data repository, with cybersecurity compliance to current international standards a stated design factor.

A use-case table maps the value delivered across three classes: performance (payload, utilisation), energy (state of charge, state of health, energy used, energy from charging), and maintenance (traditional trigger-based through to prescriptive, using expert knowledge, machine learning and AI), each with its time basis and reporting destination.

Relevant to mine operations, site management, reliability engineers and OT architects planning fleet data infrastructure.