Digital Twins and Enabling Technology Applications in Mining: Research Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges

Industry 4.0 is making a positive impact on the world’s industries in areas such as productivity, efficiency, reliability, and human safety. Although the mining industry has not undergone revolutionary digital change, numerous technologies have been applied and improved during the past two decades. Through a systematic literature survey, this study presents research trends, opportunities, and challenges in the context of digital twinning in the mining industry. The research team initially set the objectives of the research and formulated the search criteria to extract the most relevant and manageable number of scientific peer-reviewed publications. The gathered publications were then filtered using a web-based text reading and analysis environment based on defined criteria. The set of papers that were filtered during the first step was further reduced by manually reading through the abstracts, introductions, and conclusions while classifying relevant publications based on aspects such as the country of origin, technologies, and application areas. The set of papers that were retained following the second step was subjected to detailed manual reading to further explore the technologies and applications to capture the research trends, opportunities, and challenges. The research indicates that China, the USA, Australia, Russia, and Canada are the leading countries in terms of applied research and development of digital twins and enabling technologies for the mining industry. Using virtual reality, a digital twin-enabling technology, to create safer mining environments is a popular research area. In the last twenty years, academic institutions and scholars have led research efforts compared to the industry. Over the past five years, both have significantly increased their research contributions, presenting various opportunities and challenges to inspire future studies.