Huawei: Helping miners build a sustainable digital and intelligent foundation
“We’re at least six months ahead of the competition,” Andy Wu, President of the Mining Business Unit for Huawei, told IM on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, earlier this month.
“When it comes to connectivity side – with 4G, private LTE, 5G, etc – plus our ability to embed this with artificial intelligence, no-one can currently compete with us,” he added.
It is easy to be swayed by Wu’s words after touring around the massive Huawei booth in Fira Gran Via; it’s even harder to disagree after leaving the colossal halls that hosts MWC.
In every market Huawei can operate in, it is dominating the connectivity space, offering a mix of mobile and fixed options that allow even the most remote of mines to generate the low latency required to potentially automate mining operations. This success is being cross fertilised in territories such as digital twins, advanced monitoring systems, autonomous driving, predictive analytics and, of course, artificial intelligence (AI).
“Mining has moved on from manual extraction, to mechanised means and to automated functions in some instances,” Wu said. “We’re now setting our customers up for the next stage: intelligent mining.”
This stage is likely to see automated decision making as well as blasting, loading and haulage operations, zero-entry underground mining and open-pit mining overseen from IROCs, plus a whole raft of innovative – and potentially disruptive – solutions that have not yet come to the sector’s attention.
Huawei is looking to underwrite this future.
Domestic dominance
The basis of much of Huawei’s technology developments have historically been fostered in China, where regulations around productivity, safety and security led to the R&D team devising new connectivity solutions able to facility the likes of personnel tracking, injury prevention tools and more optimised operations.
“It started more than 10 years ago in the coal mines,” Wu said, referencing this regulation push. “We were one of the only companies able to offer such sophisticated connectivity solutions, and we partnered with others in our ecosystem to ensure these operations achieved compliance and achieved compliance quickly and effectively.”
Wu estimates the company has helped almost 80% of the underground coal mining industry modernise over the last decade, for instance.
Huawei has also been front and centre of China’s autonomous haulage push in open-pit mines, playing an integral role in automating battery trucks at Huaneng Mengdong Company’s Yimin open-pit coal mine in Inner Mongolia, for instance.
Here, Huawei and the mining company launched the world’s first fleet of 100 autonomous electric mining trucks into commercial operation. The Huawei Cloud commercial vehicle solution provided AI algorithms for open-pit mining operations, achieving precise perception at the vehicle end and efficient synergy at the cloud end for autonomous trucks, Huawei says.
Concurrently, the Yimin mining area deployed a 5G-A network to provide precise network coverage for the autonomous driving routes, meeting the requirements of 500 Mbps large uplink and 20-millisecond low latency. “This provides network support for high-definition video backhaul and cloud-based dispatching of autonomous mining trucks,” the company says.
The fleet of 100 “Huaneng Ruichi” electric trucks are set to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 48,000 t/y, according to the company. And, it is expected that, by 2026, there will be over 300 autonomous mining trucks running 24/7 at Yimin.
Underground, Huawei’s “intelligent transformation” has accelerated from early demonstration mines in China – such as its work creating and deploying the world’s first mining industry-specific large learning model in 2022 – to, for instance, intelligent conveyor belt monitoring and remote video control of tunnelling faces.
It also made a major connectivity leap recently with Shandong Energy, where an industrial production ring network built on SRv6 and FlexE hard slicing technologies was realised for the first time at its Lilou coal mine. Huawei explained: “All mine services, such as production control, video monitoring and personnel safety monitoring on independent networks, were migrated to ‘one bearing network’. Through slicing, it achieves service isolation, provides 50G/100G large bandwidth, and supports intelligent link switching and minute-level fault location, meeting intelligent development needs for the next five to 10 years.
“Transitioning from passive emergency repair to intelligent operations and maintenance, the integrated bearing network has improved management efficiency, ensured stable and reliable network operation, and reduced service troubleshooting time by approximately 50%.”
This network slicing technology has also been leveraged with Shandong Gold Group, where the mining company and Huawei deployed a unified underground network combining 5G (Sanshandao gold mine) and Wi-Fi Mesh (Jiaojia gold mine) to ensure equipment experiences no data transmission blind spots when moving across different network areas. This enables smooth underground communication and applications like remote-controlled drilling with jumbos.
One-network solutions
Overseas, the company is helping operators make major gains, too, with its flexible and remote networking solutions – plus openness to collaborating with local companies – helping the Huawei offering stand out in markets such as Africa, South America and Central Asia.
It’s Cell on Wheels (COW) solution is a good example. Offering portable, mobile base stations mounted on a trailer or vehicle for easy transport and deployment, it includes equipment like a telescopic mast, antennas and a power source (generator, battery module or small solar installation). The solution effectively creates 5G ‘bubbles’ that can be merged so coverage is continuous.
While COW is not a new technology, its innate flexibility is finding favour at price-sensitive open-pit sites that may require such a solution to be moved over time.
Wu said a proof of concept with an “end-to-end” solution featuring a mast, antennas, a solar photovoltaic installation and battery had already been successfully tested at a mine site in Africa, showcasing the green credentials of its latest flexible solutions.
Still on surface, a major differentiator for Huawei is the comprehensive range and flexibility of network solutions it has, and the fact that it can offer a unified network solution for the life of mine.
Here, the connectivity does not just cover the mining production areas and mining equipment – it also covers the mining camp, mining offices and entire mining property, with full CCTV video backhaul and extensive security monitoring as well as environmental monitoring. And it can be scaled up and down from the early advanced exploration stage through mine infrastructure development, mine ramp, full production and ramping down through to mine closure.
This offering is part of Huawei’s F5G solution; F5G standing for Fifth Generation Fixed Network. This is a set of fixed, fibre-based communication network standards that focus on enhancing fixed broadband access. Huawei’s unified optical network solution encompasses every aspect of connectivity a mine might need – including WiFi6/WiFi7; LAN switches; firewalls, SD-WAN; 4G/5G; optical DWDM; optical access; routers; DCN for SCADA and DCS in the concentrator; storage; virtual OS; cloud; and even meeting systems like Zoom. This means mining companies are not having to build multiple networks for multiple purposes, and therefore no longer deal with multiple digital infrastructure and connectivity providers, the company says.
“Again, the ability for us to ‘slice’ this network is key,” Wu said. “We can offer dedicated bandwidth to parts of the mining process all within one overarching connectivity solution. This reduces the complexity and number of interfaces our clients have to deal with – in some instances they could have four to eight networks all provided by different companies.”
While Huawei’s feats in China show just how far it can help mine operations on their technology journey’s Wu was adamant the company was not looking to merely “export technology” into overseas markets.
“We are reshaping the productivity paradigm of traditional industries through AI + Connectivity,” he said.
“We believe that intelligence is the ‘ark’ for the resource industry to navigate cycles and address the global countdown to carbon reduction,” he added. “Regardless of the country, as long as mining enterprises face challenges in safety, efficiency, or green transformation, we can provide digital tools based on our deep industry understanding.”
The company’s “being integrated” strategy also means it builds solutions with global partners, including local suppliers, to make sure its solutions work in the chosen location.
“Huawei has historical success cases, which are also the core scenarios of the Mining Business Unit, allowing us to help customers quickly match mature solutions with guaranteed delivery,” Wu said. “At the same time, we hope to build global showcases in regions like Latin America, South Africa, North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, empowering and uniting with partners to promote scenario-based applications and the expansion of ICT product portfolios.”
Finding data convergence
Huawei may not be providing the sensors to capture all the data, but its dedicated place within this data-based ecosystem has ensured it can shape AI developments from here.
In China, it has been part of MineHarmony, an operating system designed for building fully connected intelligent mines. These mining IoT platforms use sensing technology to ensure consistent data standards at data sources and enable synergy among multiple systems.
“This standard has been instrumental in ensuring that the data we receive to build our AI models has been consistent and productive,” Wu said. This now consists of 110 partners and 420 types of equipment certified by China’s National Key Laboratory of MineHarmony.
On the terminal side, MineHarmony enables the upgrade of both old and new sensors, equipment and portable devices, supporting interconnectivity synergy, and collaboration between different types of terminals. On the network side, MineHarmony supports smooth data transmission to the cloud through reliable and efficient integrated mining networks built using 5G, F5G, and Wi-Fi 6 technologies.
“Considering there are no real standards for data collection and reporting in the underground mining outside of China, we need to create similar blueprints to make the most of AI,” Wu added. “We will have to work with clients on coming up with such standards.”
This may sound like a big task, with readers reaching for the IREDES (International Rock Excavation Data Exchange Standard) acronym as a related reference. This aimed at devising a standard that all equipment makers would adhere to for making mining equipment and underground work site computers talk to central IT systems.
Glancing at the models that Huawei has created, and the value these models are providing in China, it looks like a worthwhile task to pursue.
Wu concluded: “The biggest change is that AI is no longer a localised experiment but is re-architecting core production systems.
“By building an ‘AI + Connectivity’ foundation, Huawei has evolved from a ‘connectivity services and solutions provider’ to ‘a builder of digital foundation or an enabler of the digital and intelligent foundation for global mining’.
“Through ‘value-driven construction’ – using the actual value generated by AI to drive infrastructure construction – we help global mining companies build a sustainable digital and intelligent foundation.”
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