Efficient Safety in Complex Autonomous Production Environments - Concept Development (ESCAPE-CD)

Purpose and goal:

The ESCAPE-CD project will provide infrastructure and solutions that enable a fleet of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles and machines from multiple suppliers to be managed in a production facility in a way that enables high productivity while ensuring safe operation at an acceptable level. The project is based on one or more use cases provided by Boliden, together with a simulation-based method for analyzing functional safety provided by MDH.

Expected results and effects:

The project will contribute to advanced digital solutions that will strengthen the competitiveness of Swedish industry, specifically within mining and the process industry in general, but also beyond.

The key expected effect is that the project will contribute towards eliminating the critical bottleneck of not being able to establish the safety of complex system-of-systems of an autonomous or semi-autonomous mine. Thereby paving the way for introducing more effective, efficient, and sustainable solutions within mining.

Approach and implementation: The project will develop methods, techniques, and tools. In this, one or two specific scenarios provided by Boliden will be considered, and the target result is a

simulation-based environment leveraging on geofencing and aligned with safety-assurance/safety management tools. There will be a close collaboration between Boliden and MDH, and a reference group with suppliers will be set up. The project is organised into work-packages targeting (1) Architecture and process, (2) Simulation, (3) Safety assurance, and (4) Integration, use-cases, and evaluation.