Towards an integration information infrastructure in coal mining asset management application

Maintenance is recognised as the largest controllable cost among direct mining costs (Lewis and Steinberg 2001). Ironically, the ideal architecture for information systems and technologies for optimising maintenance functions has not been extensively studied. While many maintenance management approaches recognise the importance of understanding equipment functionality and performance monitoring, based in an integral range of information, extensive study to attain proper organisation of the information have not been undertaken. Degradation detection and prediction applications found in recent literature are generally for specific applications rather than generic (Lee et al 2006). The current study is intended to address Longwall mining equipment integrated data infrastructure. The expected outcome of this study is to come up with a centralised information architecture that will utilise all the relevant information in the organisation to optimise asset management functions in a results based framework.