Fondazione Bruno Kessler, 38123 Trento, Italy.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Jan 25;22(3):899. doi: 10.3390/s22030899.
Inspection of mining assets is a crucial part of the maintenance process and is of interest to several stakeholders (e.g., OEMs, owners, users, and inspectors). Inspections require an inspector to verify several characteristics of the assets onsite, typically using legacy and poorly digitized procedures. Thus, many research opportunities arise from the adoption of digital technologies to make these procedures more efficient, reliable, and straightforward. In addition to cloud computing, the ubiquitous presence of modern mobile devices, new measurement tools with embedded connectivity capabilities, and blockchain technologies could greatly improve trust and transparency between the stakeholders interested in the inspection. However, there has been little discussion on integrating these technologies into the mining domain. This paper presents and evaluates an end-to-end system to conduct inspections using mobile devices that directly interact with constrained IoT sensor devices. Furthermore, our proposal provides a method to integrate constrained IoT devices as smart measuring tools that directly interact with a blockchain system, guaranteeing data integrity and increasing the trustworthiness of the data. Finally, we highlight the benefits of our proposed architecture by evaluating a real case study in a mining inspection scenario.
采矿资产检查是维护过程的重要组成部分，引起了多个利益相关者（例如，原始设备制造商、所有者、用户和检查员）的关注。检查需要检查员现场验证资产的几个特征，通常使用传统且数字化程度较差的程序。因此，采用数字技术来提高这些程序的效率、可靠性和简单性，为研究提供了许多机会。除了云计算之外，现代移动设备的普及、具有嵌入式连接功能的新型测量工具以及区块链技术，可以极大地提高对检查感兴趣的利益相关者之间的信任和透明度。但是，很少有关于将这些技术集成到采矿领域的讨论。本文提出并评估了一个使用移动设备直接与受约束的物联网传感器设备交互的端到端系统，用于执行检查。此外，我们的提案提供了一种将受约束的物联网设备集成为智能测量工具的方法，这些工具可以直接与区块链系统交互，保证数据的完整性并提高数据的可信度。最后，我们通过在采矿检查场景中评估一个真实案例研究，突出了我们提出的架构的优势。
