Smart Energy Management System: Design of a Monitoring and Peak Load Forecasting System for an Experimental Open-Pit Mine

Abstract

Digitization in the mining industry and machine learning applications have improved the production by showing insights in different components. Energy consumption is one of the key components to improve the industry’s performance in a smart way that requires a very low investment. This study represents a new hardware, software, and data processing infrastructure for open-pit mines to overcome the energy 4.0 transition and digital transformation. The main goal of this infrastructure is adding an artificial intelligence layer to energy use in an experimental open-pit mine and giving insights on energy consumption and electrical grid quality. The achievement of these goals will ease the decision-making stage for maintenance and energy managers according to ISO 50001 standards. In order to minimize the energy consumption, which impact directly the profit and the efficiency of the industry, a design of a monitoring and peak load forecasting system was proposed and tested on the experimental open-pit mine of Benguerir. The main challenges of the application were the monitoring of typical loads machines per stage, feeding the supervisors by real time energy data on the same process SCADA view, parallel integrating hardware solutions to the same process control system, proposing a fast forest quantile regression algorithm to predict the energy demand response based on the data of different historical scenarios, finding correlations between the KPIs of energy consumption, mine production process and giving global insights on the electrical grid quality.