MaxMine, a fleet management system built to lift mining performance, has unveiled what it says is the first Fleet Management System AI assistant developed specifically for the mining industry, MAXI.

Built for desktop and mobile devices with a hands-free speech-to-text feature, MAXI is designed to deliver easy access to all data within the MaxMine platform, enabling supervisors, who typically spend most of their time away from the office without access to fleet management systems, to gain insights and make data-driven decisions while on site.

Using detailed analytics and diagnostics from MaxMine’s Pulse and Impact, MAXI identifies detected issues, such as performance gaps or hardware breakdowns, and allows supervisors to use natural language to ask specific operational questions about the current shift, such as how many times a water truck has visited a refill station or how well an excavator is performing against its digging targets. MAXI also enables the mining team to record shift notes on the fly by voice or text, providing real-time visibility into what occurred during the shift and at handover, the company says. Everything is documented, with reports auto-generated at the end of each shift.

Future updates will enable it to push real-time alerts, prompting communication between supervisors and operators and suggesting solutions. For example, if unexpectedly hard digging conditions result in queuing problems, MAXI will alert the supervisor of a detected performance gap and can suggest possible solutions that can be implemented immediately.

Shaun Mitchell, MaxMine CEO, said: ­“Existing fleet management solutions can reveal what’s working, but they don’t easily identify problems and how to fix them. With MAXI, we can leverage AI in a user-accessible way to identify and fix issues before they escalate, saving everyone time and delivering greater accountability on the front line. MAXI effectively moves short interval control from the office to the pit, giving everyone confidence that the team is doing all they can to stay on target and achieve performance.”

Some of the benefits MAXI offers include:

• Allows for real-time questions on site status, allowing for fast decision making where it matters most;
• Collaboration and linkage to supervisor decisions in-field;
• Better visibility of in-field decision making;
• Greater discipline in short interval control;
• Supports the onboarding and learning development of new supervisors; and
• Provides links to the trusted MaxMine applications to verify any of the answers provided.

MAXI has already been tested at two Australian mine sites in collaboration with Batchfire Resources, a Queensland-focused producer of ultra-low impurity, low fugitive emission energy coal, demonstrating strong potential to improve safety and optimise performance and efficiency, MaxMine says.

Stuart Schmidt, General Manager – ESG & Development, Batchfire Resources, said: “MAXI has shown huge promise in these early trials, particularly for supervisors. During the trial, it helped improve accountability and communication between operators and supervisors because all are working from the same live information. Having recommendations surface automatically enabled short interval control to be more practical and actionable for the supervisors of the truck and excavator operations.”

MAXI is powered by an LLM hosted within MaxMine’s internal data centre, ensuring that user data does not leave their instance, MaxMine claims. The system accesses MaxMine datasets through custom-developed Model Context Protocols, which provide the necessary information and context for the LLM to interpret and respond to queries accurately.

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