Authors

Function-oriented approach to mining enterprise automation

Nowadays a production enterprise is inconceivable without the automation of all its processes – technological, production, and managerial. The efficiency of an enterprise largely depends on high-quality data processing within a single information space. The introduction of an integrated automated management system for an industrial enterprise, consistent with the business model, will eliminate many of the problems arising during creation, integration and development of automated systems, will create an effective enterprise management system and will reduce future costs of production modernization. Current trends of digital transformation increase the demand for an integrated business management system model, that would include a model of an integrated information management system as an integral part of it. The study aims to develop a reference functional model of mining enterprises, including a comprehensive vision of business, production and technological processes and their IT support. The model proposed is based on the analysis of existing international industry approaches to automation, as well as the experience and best practices of automation of mining enterprises. The methodological foundations of the research include enterprise architecture approach (including the concept of service-oriented architecture) and authors' function-oriented approach for engineering the IT architecture. The article describes a reference functional model of a mining enterprise, on the basis of which the structure of the mining enterprise IT-architecture functional structure is determined. The function-oriented approach for engineering IT-architecture as a reflection of the business functional structure is a good example of the symmetry phenomena in enterprise management. Further research will be devoted to the issues of designing an information exchange model and a data architecture model for the mining value chain and its individual parts in interconnection, as well as reflecting end-to-end processes of mining enterprises in the IT architecture based on the developed model for determining the boundaries of functional blocks of information systems. Read more...