Managing mining risk

A real-time risk management system that can help improve safety in mines will be available globally, after a Queensland company was awarded a licence to commercialise the technology from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Mackay-based company, Mining Logic Solutions, has signed an exclusive global licence agreement with CSIRO Exploration and Mining to commercially develop the Nexsys real-time risk management system.

Nexsys allows underground coal mines to interrogate vast amounts of digital information from a variety of sensors and systems throughout the mine, which normally do not communicate with each other.

The system analyses this data to provide real-time risk management and decision support for control room operators, including automatic triggering of response plans if it discovers a hazardous condition.

Nexsys can extract critical data from existing proprietary strata control, ventilation monitoring, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and other critical mine monitoring systems, and turn this data into knowledge in real-time – a capability that did not previously exist.