The mining industry is facing surmounting challenges today, such as deeper mining, social license to operate, access to land, and higher production rates, but at a lower cost and more challenging environments, both underground and on the surface.

By bringing together a solid transnational and interdisciplinary consortium of twenty-two partners, the MASTERMINE: "European Mining in the Green and Digital Era" Horizon Europe project aspires to become the go-to ecosystem for EU mines 4.0 that envision digitalisation, environmental sustainability, productivity monitoring and public acceptance within their strategic goals. 

The solution 

MASTERMINE uses an Industrial Metaverse approach to build a virtual world for European mines. To achieve this, the project introduces the concept of the mining Metaverse, Digital Twins and Business Intelligence. 

A multilevel structural change for the mining operations will be achieved by focusing on the following high-level modules that address real industrial challenges:

  • CYBERMINE: a suite of solutions to facilitate the digital transition of the EU mines to the Industry 4.0 era.
  • AUTOMINE: an autonomous suite along with smart monitoring and maintenance to support the implementation of autonomous vehicles and remote monitoring of assets and processes in the mining environment. 
  • GEOMINE: a geo-environment and productivity suite to advance state-of-the-art technologies currently used for the geotechnical monitoring of the mine and increase safety and stability in critical infrastructures.
  • GREENMINE: Energy, air, and waste management suite to enhance the environmental sustainability of mines by improving energy consumption, air quality and GHG emissions, water savings and waste valorisation.
  • METAMINE: An Industrial Metaverse Suite which exploits Mixed Reality Visualisation, an immersive Business Intelligence system, with advanced AI-powered capabilities for the mining sector. 
  • OURMINE: Public acceptance and Engagement solutions aiming to bridge the mining industry with the surrounding ecosystem of stakeholders and the general public.

The MASTERMINE technologies and approach will be demonstrated in five EU demo cases and at one replication demo in South Africa. The outcomes will access eleven European mines, producing ten different raw materials, including Critical Raw Materials (CRMs). 

Our company's role

In MASTERMINE, LIBRA AI Technologies will lead the following activities:  

  • Design and Develop the METAMINE Immersive BI system, the immersive dashboard that comprises the virtual control rooms and the real-time alerting system. 
  • Develop a real-time alerting system for subscribing and streaming sources, specific alarms, and prompt notification rules according to end-user needs.  
  • Define the Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) methodology as a standardised process for building, deploying and operationalising the MASTERMINE Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence systems. 
  • Develop the AI-assisted data mapping framework.  

The MLOps method and data mapping framework that will be defined and implemented by LIBRA AI will speed up the Machine Learning model development to the production process by 70%. On the contrary, more than 50% of the source-to-target data field pairing will be achieved automatically. The overall installation time to new mines will be reduced by 80% compared to the case in which the AI-assisted data mapper and the MLOps methodology and tools were missing.

Furthermore, the AI-powered immersive BI system is expected to foster a deep understanding of data, knowledge discovery and impactful decision-making. At least five dashboards will be deployed per domain, concluding in more than 20 dashboards. The BI system will provide insights, 20% of which cannot be discovered with the legacy data analysis systems.

Learn more

MASTERMINE is a 48-month European project partially funded by the European Commission's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme, with a total budget of 13,840,490.00€. The project launched its activities in December 2022. Tharsis Mining hosted the official kick-off meeting of the 22-partners consortium in Seville, Spain, on the 25th and 26th of January, 2023.

Want to learn more about MASTERMINE activities? Visit the website: https://www.mastermine-project.eu/ and follow the project on social media: