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February 25, 2021

Boliden builds a sustainable future for mining with automation, AI, and Azure

Swedish mining company Boliden produces the high-quality metals, including zinc and copper, needed to make modern life work. As part of a long-term goal to introduce more digitization and automation into its processes, Boliden used a wide range of Microsoft Azure resources—such as Azure Stack Edge, Azure IoT Edge, and Computer Vision (part of Azure Cognitive Services)—to monitor its mining sites around the clock. This has helped Boliden’s people refocus on the high-value, innovative work that drives more sustainable, environmentally friendly mining operations.

Boliden

“By working with a flexible, fully featured cloud infrastructure, we can bring more productivity, sustainability, and safety to all our sites, without needing to invent everything all over again.”

Fredrik Hases, IT Manager, Garpenberg, Boliden

Forging a sustainable future

A single wind turbine is built of more than 4.5 tons of copper and 3 tons of aluminum. Solar panels are made up of zinc, silver, copper, and tellurium. Every electric vehicle includes more than 150 kilograms of copper, nickel, zinc, cobalt, and lead. Our sustainable future will rely on metals. And Boliden operates some of Europe’s biggest mines, across Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Ireland. The company supplies industries around the globe, while it works to become the world’s most climate-friendly metals provider.

“We are bringing a sustainability perspective to mining,” says Andreas Stenlund, IT Manager for Mining Operations at Boliden. “Our goal is to limit environmental impacts at all our sites by embracing digital technology and developing stable, eco-friendly practices.”

Boliden had developed multiple in-house and on-premises solutions to monitor mining operations, but none provided a consolidated view, and many still relied on significant manual effort. The company needed to automate and centralize data collection, increase visibility across processes, and add new ways to analyze information. Focusing first on its site in Garpenberg, Sweden—one of the world’s most productive zinc mines—Boliden worked with Nexer Insight, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to build a new platform on Microsoft Azure technologies and resources.

“We wanted to get more out of our existing solutions, so we could work on powering innovation instead of focusing on maintaining and governing our platforms,” says Fredrik Hases, IT Manager at the Boliden Garpenberg mine.

Automation and innovation

Located in remote and rugged areas, mining operations rarely have the capacity for the high-demand computing an advanced data and analytics platform required. So Boliden worked with Nexer Insight to deploy Azure Stack Edge Pro with GPU at Garpenberg to connect onsite hardware and systems to Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud resources.

Boliden monitors the Garpenberg site with a network of 500 cameras that give management teams oversight of the mines, wells, and operations, helping to keep an eye on productivity and safety. The company now uses a combination of Azure IoT Edge and Azure IoT Hub to connect the cameras with other Boliden systems and the rest of its IoT network, which consists of thousands of sensors above and below ground, along with other devices.

The company uses the connected camera network to record conditions in wells used to monitor the stability of earthen dams that hold back tons of sediments extracted from the mines. Previously, human operators had to manually examine the live camera-feeds, but now site managers analyze the processed visual data to assess the stability of the dams, limit environmental impacts, and help prevent accidents.

“We tried different kinds of sensors, but they were expensive and high-maintenance, and difficult to automate. The human eye simply did the job better,” says Hases. “But that meant we had people who just sat watching the stream, and we wanted them to be able to spend their time more productively.”

With Computer Vision, part of Azure Cognitive Services, Boliden consolidates all the video streams and other sensor inputs, applying AI-assisted image analysis to identify potential hazards. It uses Azure Machine Learning to train the deep learning models that analyze the video streams, giving the company automated, around-the-clock visibility of its mines and wells. To manage and analyze the huge volumes of real-time data this produces, Boliden uses Azure Time Series Insights to give the team rapid visualization and detailed performance, productivity, and hazard insights at scale.

Insight into real-time events, trends, and the long term

By working with Azure, Boliden is bringing scalability and flexibility to its operations, combining the power of the cloud with the benefits of working locally. The team can build systems and tools in Azure and deploy them anywhere using devices. “It’s so simple and scalable,” says Hases. “This is what I thought the future should be like—and we have it now.”

Teams no longer have to dedicate hours of manual work to watching video streams, saving two hours a day and helping Boliden draw more value from its camera network. Site managers, inspectors, and analysts now get a deeper view of how the site is performing and can spend more time out in the field, and working on business development activities that help improve performance and production.

“Before, we couldn’t track any trends, and we only took detailed measurements once or twice a week,” says Hases. “With our new platform, we’re constantly analyzing those streams in depth. We can add in other data, such as weather forecasts, or information about how much sand we’re pumping out to the dams—and we can watch those trends over time.”

This extended view is playing a major role in Boliden’s environmental and climate goals, helping the team find new ways to minimize the company’s footprint. “We’re not just using the cloud to make short-term improvements in operations,” says Stenlund. “We’re using its capacity, scalability, and dedicated tools to generate new operational insights, focus on innovation and development, and inform our long-term strategies, so we can continue building a better future through sustainable mining.”

Analysis at the edge—across every site

Following its initial success, Boliden is now looking for opportunities to expand its use of Azure throughout the Garpenberg site—and even beyond, to its other sites across Europe. “We have more than 1,000 wireless access points in the Garpenberg mine itself,” says Stenlund. “Next, we want to bring in gas measurements, vibration sensors, and anything else we can add to our data platform to help us make more informed decisions. We have similar infrastructure in our other mines, and we want to replicate our success there too.”

As Boliden uses IoT and other digital technologies to help incorporate sustainability into the company’s mining operations, it is using that innovation to lead its industry into a climate-friendly—and profitable—future. “Digital and cloud technologies such as Azure are crucial for helping Boliden reduce the environmental impact of mining, and still operate profitably,” says David Österlindh, Chief Executive Officer at Nexer Insight. “The company is at the forefront of the industry and taking on a huge responsibility.”

For Boliden’s IT team, the simplicity of expanding its Azure environment is key to rolling out its new consolidated platform—and all its automation and machine learning components—to the rest of its operations. “By working with a flexible, fully featured cloud infrastructure, we can bring more productivity, sustainability, and safety to all our sites, without needing to invent everything all over again,” says Hases.

Find out more about Boliden on LinkedIn.

“It’s so simple and scalable. This is what I thought the future should be like—and we have it now.”

Fredrik Hases, IT Manager, Garpenberg, Boliden

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