A Step Towards Smart, Ergonomic and Sustainable Mining Machinery Workplaces

Although the mining industry is the oldest one, it is still a major source of pollution with more people hurt or injured than in any other industry, while social conflicts around it are worldwide spread. Namely, mining projects still have direct and indirect environmental impacts and seriously affect land, water, air, biota, and people, while mining equipment focused in this paper has the highest footprint. The reason for the lack of progress in mining industry is the most likely the fact that in current research streams technology-centered design dominates. Our novel Smart Miner concept aims to create a step toward smart, ergonomic and sustainable mining machinery workplaces. It proposes a paradigm shift from pure technology to a Human and Data-Centric Engineering, which could be easily transferred to other industries, and develops solutions for raising the level of environmental quality in complex interactions between phys- ical, behavioral and organizational processes field, by matching advanced operator I4.0&5.0 and society S5.0 standards. An original idea approval route starts with mining machinery operator wellbeing in its microenvironment and its cyclical alignment with stakeholders in the value chain. After development of smart, ergonomic, non-invasive and reliable operator aid systems for regulation of physical environment job stressors - noise, human vibration, lighting, temperature, air quality, workplace layout issues etc., which solve environmental and human health issues and influence overall performance, research passes to operator macroenvironment determined by organizational contextual factors, which also impair sustainable development results. Micro and macro levels are planned to be connected and balanced by real time analytics to fit high sustainability performance indicators in novel, flexible and scalable system, aimed to increasing productivity and production together with reducing emissions and decrease of accidents rate.