AziSA: improving mining decisions with real time data

Abstract

South African underground hard rock mines are typically managed using measurements made daily, weekly or even monthly of key parameters face advance, readiness to blast, blast success, temperature or dust levels. Health, safety and productivity can all be greatly improved if a realtime measurement system can inform decision making. To enable this vision of widespread sensing, communication and decision support, CSIR has developed an open standard architecture for communication of sensor data, and a reference implementation using that standard. The standard, called AziSA, meaning 'to inform' in isiZulu, will allow any device that complies with it to join any network that supports it. The standard is designed for South African gold and platinum mines. In this paper the design is discussed, and a future application for a platinum mine is considered