The world has gone through three industrial revolutions (mechanization, mass production, automation) and we are moving towards a fourth industrial revolution, with some implications that are still difficult to envision. On a local level, Fundación Chile has led in recent years the development of a roadmap towards the mining of the future (4.0), defining the driving and enabling nuclei for this roadmap.
Among the main conclusions that emerge from this analysis are:
- Technology will drive the horizontal integration of the mining business.
- It is mandatory to have higher standards and protection levels of information.
- Mineral extraction and processing must be responsible and safe.
- An agile regulatory framework will be essential to adapt to the speed of technological change.
- To capture the value of this change in the industry, a new types of skills program development is necessary, aligned with mining 4.0.
Using this vision as a starting point, we became interested in knowing how the congresses related to mineral processing and geometallurgy have behaved during the last ten years. The objective is to identify, at a high level, if there are changes in the list of articles and presentations in line with the requirements of the industry.
In order to do this, using the R programming environment, the analysis was performed using the bag of words method, which allows (after carrying out an import pre-process and data wrangling), calculate the words frequency and normalize the results to compare between different congresses of the specialty. Technical articles from 5 different conferences were used over 10 years. This data set was crossed with a work referring to Industry 4.0 to evaluate similarity of words with the different conferences.
According to the analysis carried out, in the last 8 years the topics of the congresses related to mineral processing have increased the discussion on issues of the fourth industrial revolution by less than 5%. This highlights the need to promote articles related to the vision proposed by Fundación Chile in the roadmap towards the mining of the future. We hope that in the short term more professionals will focus on promoting content that points to this new integrative, green and safe mining.
