No abstract

In recent years there has been more development of automation solutions for underground mining operations. Various vendors usually provide their proprietary machines and remote operation stations (ROS) to their customers, which makes information for remote supervisory control increasingly distributed and scattered for the operators. Integrating existing automation solutions such as introducing unified ROS could be considered potentially beneficial to ameliorate the problem of information fragmentation, enhance user experience and improve productivity, but it is critical to understand the effect of such future technological solutions in the sociotechnical system where elements of human, technologies and organization interact with each other. Integrating automation solutions is essentially bringing changes to the work system which would potentially pose new demands on the human operators and existing rules. This paper aims to uncover the challenges that may emerge in the sociotechnical system of remote underground mining as well as their design implications. A field study to a modern underground mining site in Sweden was conducted to explore the user perspectives of a diverse range of the workers who are designated different tasks per current organizational structure and goals. During the field study, eight participants including six remote control operators and two management personnel were invited for in-depth individual interviews. Additionally, two of them and another five operators were invited for a focus group interview. The participants were asked about their experiences of remote control operations and their interaction with the existing systems, together with their perceptions and views on how a unified remote operation station can affect their daily practice. The qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings have revealed a range of inter-connected challenges for the realization of the unified ROS, covering cognitive, organizational, physical, technical and interface design aspects. They suggest that whether the operators can continue succeeding in remote supervisory control does not only rely on the capabilities of the futuristic notion of unified ROS, but also on how the human-technology interaction relationship unfolds in the new working context. These insights inform the value of a holistic systems approach when it comes to feasibility studies on new technologies and their impact on human users. To address the concerns of the operators and ensure improved user experience and safety, it is important that the design of the systems is aligned with reorganization endeavors. Besides, collaborative efforts among industrial vendors are considered necessary to ultimately benefit the users.

Concern for the health of the natural environment is growing as human population grows. Recently, renewed attention has been given to the environmental impact of fires and the fire implications of sustainability choices made in the built environment. To properly understand the environmental impact of fires, however, it is crucial that we can estimate fire emissions. This paper explores the concept of fire emissions and emission factors and investigates the potential to use small scale testing to develop emission factors for fire emissions. The findings show that there is a potential to use dynamic tests such as the cone calorimeter (CC, ISO 5660) and fire propagation apparatus (FPA, ISO 12136) to develop emission factors to estimate larger scale fire emissions, at least for CO and CO2 emissions. While there is a spread of data from between the CC or FPA and the medium scale tests, this is of the same order or less than the spread between the two small scale tests. The spread in emission factor values from the various tests is smaller for CO2 than for CO and greatest for small CO-emission factors (< 10 g/kg). More work is needed to similarly characterise a broad range of species.