The Mining and Metallurgical Industries are faced with ever-increasing complexities due to intense global competition, more-difficult-to-treat ores and concentrates, increased demands for environmental controls and more-complicated decisions regarding product distribution and quality. In North America, where we now mine relatively low-grade, refractory-type ores using highly-paid skilled labor, we can only compete with those regions of the world with high-grade, easy-to-treat ores and low-wage labor by operating our plants at maximum efficiency using automation and economies of scale. As control of global markets continues to move to other continents, it is necessary for North American operators to adopt new techniques to increase profitability and continue to mine, mill and produce metals and other final products. An area of automation that remains to be adopted by the Mining industry is that being developed in the field of Manufacturing Science. Significant research efforts have focused in recent years on methods to do the following: -Collect and intelligently manage large amounts of data from all parts of the company. -Analyse data with a view to optimize across all departments and subsidiaries. -Develop intelligent simulation models to predict and control interactions between different autonomous parts of an organization. -Apply intelligent robots to perform routine tasks presently done by people. -Simulate assembly lines and factory processes to find novel ways to reorganize and deal with complex processing steps. This paper will review the principle methods of Factory Automation, Agent Technologies, Holonic Systems, Robotics and Intelligent Data Processing and suggest possible applications in the mining, mineral and metallurgical industries.
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