With data becoming increasingly important for mining operations, the need for a unified, integrated data architecture that eliminates data silos, as well as enhances efficiency, profitability and real-time decision-making becomes more important.

This was the topic discussed during this year’s first Knowledge for Industry event, hosted by the Society for Automation, Instrumentation, Mechatronics and Control (SAIMC) and motor and large-drive systems supplier Innomotics South Africa on March 19.

During the presentation Innomotics Germany automation and digitalisation global sales head Bernardo Marinho and Innomotics South Africa digitalisation team leader Dagan le Roux highlighted the need for a solution that could connect data across different sites and improve operational models.

Marinho noted that one of the primary challenges encountered when attempting to integrate technology and leverage data for efficient material flows and synchronised operations was the persistence of data silos.

“We are still facing a lot of islands . . . in terms of data,” he said.

Hence, Le Roux and Marinho argued for the introduction of a mediator as a mechanism to consolidate data on mining operations, highlighting message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) systems as a solution.

Likening data to the “new gold”, Le Roux described MQTT as a lightweight messaging protocol that allows for data to be transmitted over the wire, requiring a minimal amount of bandwidth.

Used across various industries such as automotive, manufacturing and telecommunications, he pointed out that MQTT was also reliable, flexible, scalable, secure and persistent.

“There's no reason why MQTT cannot work in mining,” he said.

He noted that MQTT used transport layer security, which enabled high levels of security and data encryption over the wire.

In cases of poor network coverage, Le Roux noted that MQTT was persistent and able to store the data locally and upload and send it when the network became available again.

He explained that a broker, or mediator,was at the heart of the technology that allowed a client to be both a producer and consumer of data.

“The broker is that central hub that manages all of the chaos in the world, and you can add another client to create a new connection to that broker that consumes the data, so it subscribes to any changes in the data,” he said.

Moreover, to ensure streamlined communication in addition to connectivity, he explained that a unified namespace could be used to structure data within an MQTT broker, describing it as an architectural pattern that got overlaid onto an MQTT broker.

Le Roux noted that the MQTT broker provided centralised data access, standardisation, digital transformation, vendor independence and real-time data availability.

Meanwhile, SAIMC CEO Johan Maartens discussed the importance for engineers to register with the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) to avoid potential legal risks of performing work as an unregistered engineer.

He noted that the Engineering Profession Act stipulated that only people registered with ECSA were allowed to do engineering work, which included mechatronics and computer engineering.