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 filtrate of the first step was then refined by manually reading through abstracts, introductions, and conclusions while classifying relevant publications based on aspects such as the country of origin, technologies, and application areas. The filtrate of 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 outcomes indicate that China, the USA, Australia, Russia, and Canada are the leading countries in this research context. Creating a safer mining environment using virtual reality is popular among other applications and technologies. 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.