Digitization of the mining industry: Pathways to sustainability through enabling technologies

Abstract

Mining is one of the biggest industries in terms of product generation and revenue earned, and is deemed as the lifeline for countries around the world. However, in current times, it is ridden with several problems right from environmental threats to the slow turnover and throughput rate of production it offers. As a result, the demand of digitization and advancement of the mining process emerges so as to improve efficiency. With so many technological breakthroughs, there exists a need to realize what technologies are best suited for the development of a more sustainable mining industry. This study aims to recognize the enabling technologies for digitization of the mining processes using a three-step novel methodology. The findings indicate that sustainability is the most important criterion while big data analytics, machine learning, autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence are most important technologies that enables digitization of the mining processes for sustainable mining.