MLOC

Purpose and goal

MLOC was set up to investigate the potential of IoT in the mining industry and to test the concept of mass localization in a mining environment. The project has worked actively with workshops and also presented the results on IoT Sweden´s spring seminar in Stockholm on 23 April. MLOC has developed and tested a number of technologies and components for mass location and then gathered data to a cloud service specialized for IoT and embedded systems. Collected data has been visualized in real time but also post processed and analyzed with the help of analysis tools written to handle Big Data.

Results and expected effects

MLOC has conducted successful tests in a mining environment with a number of mobile installations and a variety of sensors, RFID tags and RFID antennas. All possible information from the installations has been logged in a scalable infrastructure. The project has created an analytical tool based on Boliden´s needs to be able to assess which components may be deemed useful in the mining environment without adaptation and some have even been weeded out. Boliden and all other project partners are interested to do further work and the formulation of a continuation project have started.

Approach and implementation

Most of the project team know each from before which made the project work flowed smoothly. Remote project meetings where interspersed with visits to the Kristineberg mine. The project has been driven by an incremental development model where technology prototypes was tested in a lab environment before the technology was implemented in the mine. The distance to the test site has been the main cause of the delays and problems in the project as it is difficult to get the lab environment to emulate the operating environment properly.