Digital Twins of Operational Scenarios in Mining for Design of Customized Product-Service Systems Solutions

Abstract

The paper presents an approach, based on the development of digital twins, to support the transition toward electromobility and autonomy in the mining industry, by supporting the design space exploration of future operational scenarios based on different construction equipment and mining site configurations. With such an intent, the paper presents an approach combining systems and systems-of-systems simulations to run trade-off analysis based on different product-service systems (PSS) configurations. Additionally, the paper integrates the “operational context” variables in PSS design simulations to create a digital twin of a “mining operational scenario” customizable for the specific configurations of each mine. The paper exemplifies the proposed approach by contextualizing in a reference mining site describing how the multi-dimensional simulations have enabled PSS trade-off analysis and PSS sensitivity analyses, and how operational context variables are integrated into the digital twin of the operational scenario.