Sustainable Mining and Metallurgy

Digital plant is the direction for future plant construction. A digital control system can transcend spatial, systematic and organizational divides in a plant, realize the integration and collaboration of human and financial resources, materials, production, and supply, and provide data support for production and optimization decisions. A hydrometallurgical plant adopted the “1+1+N” intelligent plant architecture, and combined cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to conduct digital upgrading of production management and control. This paper introduced the hardware and network architecture involved in the digital upgrading, as well as the core functions of the software, and analyzed the application effect and value of the digital engineering to the factory.The digital upgrade provides users with mobile and real-time access to situations of the production line, cuts down on the manual transferring of information, and improves significantly the efficiency of the plant’s production process control.