A SOA-based framework for integration of intelligent rock bolts with internet of things

The mining industry is seeing a bright future with a high demand for minerals and relatively high material prices. Much of this is driven by the rapid industrial expansion in countries such as China and others. However, even though the mining business seems promising, there are some important issues that must be addressed in order to maintain a cost-effective and competitive edge. Worker and environment safety, working conditions, are very important issues. Another issue is attracting skilled personal to work in the deep mines of the future. Today, the mining industry has problems hiring personnel, due to hazardous working environments and re-locating to the distant regions. If the workers´ safety could be increased, attracting skilled personnel would become one less problem. Rock bolts and shotcrete are in use today to reinforce tunnel walls, and expensive measurement devices are used in order to monitor seismic activity and rock stress. However, by not having real-time monitoring of rock bolts makes it difficult to monitor them. A better approach would be to make rock bolts intelligent and have them measure stress and seismic activity. Furthermore, by connecting the rock bolts to a network, real-time monitoring of them is made feasible. In this paper, we propose the merger of the Internet of Things (IoT) approach with traditional rock bolts, thereby allowing online monitoring of rock bolt status. This enables an increased possibility to enhance work safety by being able to detect anomalies on the rock earlier, thereby giving workers and machinery an earlier alarm to evacuate hazardous locations in the mine.