On Monday, 24 February 2025 the IREDES organization hosted an online meeting to discuss current and future activities. The meeting was attended by 8 members and a large part of it was taken up by requests for future updates.
- Optional comment on the drill hole quality.
Two alternatives were discussed:- The operator selects an entry from a predefined structured list (potentially transferred with the drill plan), which would enable an electronic analysis of the items to create statistics etc. It also enables the OEM as well as the mine to add machine or operation specific entries. This however is a bit higher implementation effort.
- A comment field of Free tex
It was chosen to go for option b) as a free text comment.
- DRPQual Hole Status.
The request was to add a “Reason” field in form of a comment in case the Enumeration “Fail” or “Others” is chosen as Hole Status. Additionally, an “Aborted” field was requested.- Success
- Fail
- Others
One of the participants sees the need for clarification, what the aborted status means in connection with a drill hole; Especially the differentiation to “Fail” needs clarification.
A solution can be to include an optional “Comment” field in the hole’s general spec (same as above) or as a subordinated element to HoleStatus (which would require to change the structural setup of HoleStatus.
- Operator Info
Add an optional operator info (name of the operator) tag for each hole to the drill rig quality log. This would help the tracking, if multiple people are working on the same drill plan. The request is passed and the info will be added as IRtext to the HoleQuality Structure. - Hole positioning quality
The request to add an optional GNSS (satellite navigation) quality indicator to the drill hole quality log is discussed. The question arises whether this should apply to above and underground rigs. an Epiroc employee remarks, that Epiroc currently uses additional information outside of the IREDES standard and that he will check, how it is implemented. One of his colleagues adds, that there is also quality indication for underground drill rigs, although it is not based on satellite navigation.
Comment from the IREDES office on that:
The Drill Quality can be indirectly derived from the Difference between StartPoint (EndPoint) in the Drill Plan (DRPPlan) versus the respectice entries made in the Quality Reporting (DRPQual). These are part of DRholeType elements in both profiles. Should there an additional tag be needed please define the intended content and how the related tag can be defined. - Handling of coordinate systems and geoid.
It shows that there is the necessity to further explain the flexibility and detailled handling of the coordinate systems in IREDES. Einar Gløersen as one of the main creators of the IREDES coordinate system handling volunteers to give a course on how this is intended to work. A related web meeting will be scheduled at earliest convenience. - Sequence Numbering
In HoleQualityData there already is a tag “Drill Seq”. In the Drill Plan the hole sequence is defined in the BoomSeq tag structure which defines the sequence of the holes to be drilled by each individual boom. Please report to the IREDES office whether this is sufficient or whether different setups / changes are required. - Minimum Hole Length
A minimum hole length tag shall be introduced in the DrillPlan structure to define a minimum length a hole has to have to allow blasting. This applies to both tunneling and production drill rigs. - Changes procedure
All members are requested to check whether tags in the profiles are obsolete, duplicated or misinterpretable. Please report to the IREDES office together with a short but comprehensive reasoning. Related questions will be taken up at the next meeting. In the meantime, IREDES office is going to include the undisputed changes above into a new schema.
Measurement While Drilling Data Conflict
We again want to inform IREDES members about the service to cross check data sets against the IREDES standard, which is offered by the IREDES organization. For this please send original IREDES data sets to the IREDES office (they can be anonymized without customer information etc) so we can then publish the respective data set and the originating machine as “IREDES compliant” on the web site.
Timeline Data Clarification
We also want to use this opportunity to inform you about our talks with the global mining guidelines group from Canada. The timeline model they are providing is a framework to measure the operational timing. As such it forms the basis for performance analysis of the entire operation.
Originally the model was designed for surface mining also defining key performance indicators for the utilization and availability of mining and construction equipment and is now implemented in a slightly modified version in the applicationBaseClasses and the LHD equipment profile and will cover the whole standard in the future. The aim is now for the GMG to define the contents of the models while IREDES is providing the IT level representation of all electronically available timing information. The scope of IREDES will be limited here to the electronically gatherable information. To be defined basing on the GMG information by a smaller expert group in IREDES. A call was made to nominate interested participants so this work can be commenced shortly.
Such definitions may render other timing related definitions in IREDES obsolete to avoid redundancy.
JSON as an additional carrier
IREDES is continuing its work on JSON as an additional carrier which was a request from the member base. There will be a possibility to generate these documents automatically basing on the XML schema definitions close to the existing standard as possible. Epiroc offers to take part in the beta testing. IREDES will support both JSON and XML as carrier in the future.
OPC UA companion specification mining
The IREDES – part of the OPC UA companion specification mining has been developed in collaboration with the German VDMA. It currently contains the LHD/trucks equipment profile, which is a production performance profile. Christoph Mueller calls into question, whether it makes sense to continue to put efforts into this and to broaden it to other profiles. Since none of the participants have experience with OPC UA and there was little to no response to the past activities, it is decided to discontinue the project.
IREDES checksum
One of the participants asks to discuss the checksum used in the IREDES standard as there are often problems concerning its correct calculation. The checksum was used in the beginning to ensure data integrity when transferring data via serial communication or memory media. He explains that even in these cases it is possible to use mechanisms integrated into XML. He suggests to remove the checksum and use the internal mechanisms of XML in the future. This will be checked and potentially obsolete with the coming version.
Continued Activities
Christoph Cibis will form an experts group to take up the Clarifications on the IREDES coordinate system together with Einar Gløersen.
Another call for an experts group on operational timing, potentially together with GMG will be formed.
The changes discussed above will be communicated by the IREDES organization. Changes will be collected until May31, after which a new version schema draft will be published in the community.