Our client approached us to embed a system safety approach into the risk management of Autonomous mining equipment during the operations and maintenance phases.
We were faced with an operations and maintenance risk management approach that has traditionally focused on the functional safety of a fixed plant, or on the procedural controls used for manned mobile mining equipment. The expansion of autonomous equipment into the surface mining environment at several of our client’s site required a different approach.
- In close collaboration with the client’s mobile mining equipment safety experts, we modified the risk management safety control standards for operations and maintenance, to adopt a system safety approach that had been used successfully within recent Autonomous Haulage deployment projects whilst leveraging existing systems, engineering processes and tools already in use for upgrades of various mining systems.
- We restructured the requirements management tool currently used to capture test case results during upgrades of OEM mining systems, to help facilitate a streamlined use of the tool in demonstrating coverage of system safety risk controls for Autonomous systems going forward.
- We identified gaps in existing verification and validation test cases used during previous Autonomous system upgrades and collaborated with test and commissioning engineers to modify the existing setup and implement new test cases to close these gaps going forward.
- We participated in system safety reviews of Autonomous system hazard logs as part of the client’s Management of Change processes.
- Our contribution and collaboration resulted in the improvement to the maturity of other systems engineering processes critical to system safety, such as configuration management and competency management.
Want to know more? Call our team on (08) 6146 4446 or email info@vgtech.com.au for an obligation free consultation.
Back to case studies