Towards a collaborative system for delivery of remote mine services

While work has been done to support remote collaboration, and many remote access products exist, these efforts often need stable connections and high bandwidths, or have a mix of functionality, poor security, or complicated set up processes. There is no singular piece of remote collaboration technology suitable for the remote delivery of high-quality planning and scheduling services to clients at a mining site. To fill this gap, a remote mining engineer (RME) concept has been proposed and a functional requirements analysis has been conducted. Based on the identified requirements, a further study was performed to characterise existing technologies and identify the scope for future work. We report on the method and findings of this study in this paper. The main contribution is the identification of a suitable collaboration tool for developing RME.