Estab­lished in 2017, the VDMA OPC UA Min­ing Ini­ti­at­ive has united machine man­u­fac­tur­ers, soft­ware pro­viders, and mine oper­at­ors to devel­op a future-proof, vendor inde­pend­ent inter­face using OPC UA. This stand­ard sup­ports rich inform­a­tion mod­els for seam­less data exchange.

Organ­ized by VDMA Min­ing & Min­er­als and sup­por­ted by the OPC Found­a­tion, the ini­ti­at­ive has developed parts of the OPC UA Min­ing Com­pan­ion Spe­cific­a­tion. These enable ver­tic­al data flow from sensors to cloud sys­tems, form­ing a com­mon lan­guage for min­ing automation.

The OPC UA Min­ing inform­a­tion mod­el applies to all min­ing sys­tems – extrac­tion, trans­port, pro­cessing, plan­ning, and more. Due to the broad scope of min­ing, ini­tial efforts focused on mobile machines and long­wall min­ing, emphas­iz­ing ease of imple­ment­a­tion and relevance.

Ongo­ing work includes:

• Spe­cial­ist Group Con­vey­ing: defines use cases for con­vey­or sys­tems, focus­ing on safe, effi­cient com­mu­nic­a­tion between com­pon­ents and SCADA systems.
  Covered func­tions include startup/shutdown, load shar­ing, con­di­tion mon­it­or­ing, and asset management
• First release use cases: startup/shutdown, brake con­trol, belt mon­it­or­ing and clean­ing, asset management.
• Next release: con­vey­ing KPIs, advanced con­di­tion monitoring.
• Spe­cial­ist Group Pro­cessing: involves experts from mobile and sta­tion­ary pro­cessing sys­tems. They reviewed exist­ing specs, iden­ti­fied machine-spe­cif­ic data, and are devel­op­ing new use cases and data exchange mod­els. Col­lab­or­a­tion with SENAI in Brazil sup­ports this effort.

VDMA/SENAI cooper­a­tion in Brazil
A joint group devel­ops use cases for con­vey­or and pro­cessing sys­tems with man­u­fac­tur­ers and oper­at­ors in Brazil.