Designing a network-based system for delivery of remote mine services

There is a great body of work in the areas of tele-assistance/tele-collaboration offering novel and effective ways to improve collaboration between personnel located at a remote mine site and off-site personnel located in major metropolitan areas. Much of this work involves the use of high-bandwidth communications or targeted sensory experiences using large format displays. There are also existing remote access technologies but these suffer from limited functionality (providing text, voice, video or one-way desktop sharing), are often poorly supported in the security-conscious corporate environment and require complicated set up processes. There is currently no singular piece of remote collaboration technology that is suitable for the delivery of high-quality planning and scheduling services to clients at a mining site from a remote operating centre. In response to this issue, as part of a research and technology development effort between CSIRO and a mining engineering firm, we have developed a concept of remote mining engineer (RME), and conducted a functional requirements analysis, for delivering mining engineering services to mine sites remotely. Based on the obtained requirements, a further study was performed to characterise existing technologies and to identify the scope for future work in designing and prototyping a network based system for RME. In this paper, we report on the method and findings of this study.