Nornickel Deploys Tire Monitoring System at Skalisty Mine
The first stage of deploying a system to monitor pressure in large mining tires at Nornickel’s Skalisty Mine in the Polar Division was completed in partnership with technology company Reksoft.
The program monitors pressure and temperature sensors installed on tires used by underground mining equipment, including haul trucks and load-haul-dump machines operating in demanding underground conditions. Real-time transmission of tire pressure and temperature data gives dispatch teams the information they need to monitor equipment condition.
A digital monitoring framework for industrial equipment brought together hardware components – such as sensors and data transmission equipment – with software and analytical dashboards used by engineering teams. Integration with existing enterprise management systems shifted tire maintenance from a reactive model, in which faults are addressed after equipment fails, to a predictive one.
Scaling Up
Nornickel has already decided to scale the product to four mines in its Polar Division: Taimyrsky, Oktyabrsky, Komsomolsky and Mayak. The company is now moving from a local pilot project toward a unified approach to digital equipment-condition monitoring at large industrial facilities.
Working with Nornickel, the Reksoft development team completed the full project cycle, from equipment design and supply to software development, installation and integration with existing systems. The process also led to changes in maintenance practices, from updating instructions to setting up tire inflation stations. Going forward, such solutions are expected to evolve by combining data from multiple sources, including equipment sensors, dispatch systems, production planning systems and analytics platforms.
Nornickel’s experience also showed that industrial companies need more than individual sensors or monitoring software. They need integrated systems that bring together equipment, analytics and management processes. This is one of the industry’s promising challenges. Developing Russian platforms for managing industrial data could become a separate area of growth, not only in mining but also in energy, transportation and logistics.
Building Blocks for Development
Since 2019, Nornickel has been developing a unified digital platform for managing mining and geological data: MinePRO. Russian company OT-OIL, part of Nornickel, developed the automated system for processing and analyzing mining and geological data. Since then, the system has been continuously adapted to the specific requirements of the mining group. During implementation, separate systems developed back in the 2000s were brought together. In particular, Plan-zamer (Survey Plan) for mine surveyors and ARM-geolog (Geologist’s Workstation) for geologists were tied to Windows, were not connected to each other and stored data in different formats. As a result, the company had accumulated more than 100,000 mine workings across two separate legacy systems, more than 5,000 disparate planning files, more than 1 million modeling and design files, and more than 200 forms for manual report entry.
At Nornickel’s production facilities, the shift from traditional mining-equipment management to digital models took place in 2022, when the company launched a remote automated drilling system. The system used remote equipment control, video monitoring and real-time transmission of sensor data. The experience clearly showed that digitalization at mining operations is advancing not only through automation of individual tasks but also through the creation of a unified data infrastructure.
A year later, the company reported that it was continuing to develop computer vision and data analytics technologies for mining. It launched a software suite for monitoring mining equipment operations and analyzing equipment utilization based on video data, as well as Rudopotok (Ore Flow) to optimize underground logistics and monitor ore characteristics using computer vision technologies.
The current project confirms that industrial Internet of Things solutions, digital twins, monitoring systems and predictive analytics are becoming a key area of import substitution, as companies need not simply to replace foreign software but to build integrated digital platforms for managing production.
