A total of 1 152 locomotives move 36-million tons of ore and interface with 58 500 employees in a confined area.
Digitalisation has slashed by nearly 70% underground locomotive incidents at Sibanye-Stillwater’s South African gold and platinum group metal (PGM) mines.
The digital locomotive systems improve safety and productivity by managing interactions and logistics.
Already, R330-million has been invested and on the cards is the probable investment of an additional R800-million to improve data volume, velocity and veracity still further.
“When you look at the big picture, we have 1 152 locomotives moving 36-million tons of ore and interfacing with 58 500 of the company’s employees in a confined area,” Sibanye-Stillwater CEO Neal Froneman told this year’s DigiMine event organised by the University of the Witwatersrand and covered by Engineering News & Mining Weekly.
“We have identified 3 600 behaviours and actions for each locomotive per day. These are monitored and used to help guide training and improve behaviours,” said Froneman, who described the size of the Johannesburg- and New York-listed company’s underground South African locomotive fleet as probably being ten times that of Transnet.