February 5, 2024 - Hitachi Construction Machinery Co Ltd says it is starting full-scale operation of a remote monitoring support system operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year called the Technological Centre of Excellence (TCoE), which will monitor its dump truck Autonomous Haulage System (AHS) used at mines from a location in Brisbane in Queensland, Australia.

Hitachi Construction Machinery will utilise the TCoE to focus on expanding the sales of its AHS in Australia, a strategic region for its mining business, with the goal of offering AHS worldwide. Moreover, the company says it will provide constant, remote monitoring of mining sites where Hitachi Construction Machinery’s AHS operates through TCoE to help increase overall mine operational efficiency.

At TCoE, the same information that customers are getting in their mine control room, is monitored in real time. Human resources with expertise in specialised fields such as mining machinery, mining operation, software, etc will use advanced digital technologies to accumulate, analyse, and deconstruct all data acquired in real-time from multiple mining sites.

Next, they will derive solutions for the issues faced by each customer to help streamline and optimise the entire mine through involvement in the actual mine operation. “In the future, TCoE will evolve into becoming the core hub in charge of coordination for the mining solutions business and utilise various digital technologies and accumulated knowledge to create new value and provide continuous support from a customer perspective.”

Hitachi Construction Machinery began researching AHS in 2009. Based on the results of five years of research and development, the company has validated AHS at a test site in Australia since 2013 for the purpose of realising sequential mining operations for loading, hauling, and dumping using autonomous dump trucks. In July 2018, Hitachi Construction Machinery agreed with Whitehaven Coal to collaborate on AHS and confirmed that the developed AHS has reached a practical level of performance over the roughly six year period of collaboration.

The Hitachi Construction Machinery Group has strived to implement ‘Reliable Solutions’ that solve social issues as a close and reliable partner for our customers. Going forward, it will offer AHS to mining industry customers around the world to contribute to the higher level of safety and productivity required by its customers.