

Smart Technologies in Mining Operations Track
Track Focus
This track focuses on developing innovative technology solutions that accelerate and enhance mineral exploration, while enabling advanced compliance and monitoring services across mining operations.
Through integrating automation and digitalization, participants can design solutions that improve the accuracy and speed of exploration activities, strengthen regulatory compliance, and reduce reliance on manual intervention. Such technologies not only support adherence to safety and environmental standards but also increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enable faster decision-making across exploration and compliance processes.
The track opens opportunities for participants to pioneer solutions that support transparent, sustainable, and efficient exploration practices, driving the mining sector toward greater innovation, improved productivity, and long-term sustainability.
Challenges
Challenge 1: Seamless Compliance Across Mining Complexes
A mining complex is an integrated system of facilities and operations that work together to extract, process, and transport minerals or metals. It may include multiple mines, processing plants, tailings storage facilities, and transport infrastructure.
Because mining complexes bring together diverse activities, they are subject to strict regulations and standards. One of the key challenges is ensuring real-time monitoring and timely reporting of compliance and inspection status, as well as detecting and addressing deviations as they occur. Examples include tracking truck movements and weights, verifying the declared volume of transported materials, and adhering to mineral transportation and safety requirements.
Technology-driven solutions are essential to embed compliance into everyday operations. Innovative tools can provide real-time visibility of compliance levels, strengthen inspection and reporting capabilities, and ensure transparency across the complex. Ultimately, such solutions will drive a safer, more efficient, and more sustainable mining operations.
Solution Pathways:
AI-powered Remote Inspection and Predictive Maintenance
Leveraging advanced technologies to overcome distance and harsh conditions, enabling remote and multi-site inspections, to increase efficiency, reduce manual effort, and enable proactive maintenance.
Real Time Compliance Reporting and Risk Management
Leverage advanced hardware and software technologies to design end-to-end systems that deliver real-time insights, predict potential risks, and enable accurate reporting and informed decision-making.
Challenge Partners

Challenge 2: Optimizing Exploration Efficiency
Mineral exploration is the systematic process of identifying and evaluating potential mineral deposits hidden beneath the earth's surface. It involves the collection and analysis of geological, geochemical, and geophysical information to reduce uncertainty about the location, grade, quality, and composition of ore bodies.
In mineral exploration, this uncertainty often leads to excessive drilling, inflated costs, and delayed project timelines. Fluctuating market conditions and rising sustainability requirements amplify the need for more accurate resource targeting before ground is broken.
By integrating datasets from multiple sources, explorers can forecast ore types, grades, and distributions ahead of drilling. This not only enables more precise exploration plans, but also lays the foundation for optimized blending strategies. When mining begins, ores of different qualities from various deposits must often be mixed to create a consistent feed for processing plants. Accurate exploration data allows companies to design these blending strategies early, improving efficiency, reducing waste, and ensuring compliance with safety and environmental standards.
The proposed solutions should give mining operators the power to plan smarter, blend better, and act faster, turning delays into decisions and uncertainty into opportunity. Ultimately, it's about making smarter decisions with fewer resources while maximizing the chances of discovering economically viable deposits.
Solution Pathways:
Predictive Modelling
A data-driven process that uses geological, operational, and historical information to forecast ore locations, grades, and potential risks in mining.
Real-time Grade Analysis
Instant measurement and analysis of ore quality during mining to guide decisions and reduce waste.
Challenge Partners
