Revolutionising Dust Emissions Management for a Global Mining Leader

Overview

A global resource company operating large-scale open-cut mines needed to fundamentally change how it managed dust emissions across its sites. The existing approach was reactive — relying on historical particulate data that was minutes or hours old, individual operator judgement, and post-event analysis. This left operations exposed to unplanned downtime, compliance risk, and health and safety concerns for workers and surrounding communities.

Knowble was engaged to co-design and build DEE (Dust Emissions Ecosystem) — a purpose-built air quality platform that would shift dust management from reactive response to proactive, data-driven planning.

The Challenge

Mine site dust management across the industry relied on a fundamentally flawed model:

• Particulate measurement using historical data — always looking backwards
• Limited forward-looking weather intelligence
• Reactive responses triggered by alarms and trend breaches
• Decisions based on individual judgement rather than systematic analysis
• Air quality assessment conducted only after events had already impacted operations

The client needed a solution that would give operators, mine planners, and environmental teams forward-looking visibility into dust emissions risk — not just for the next shift, but across months and seasons — to align operational planning with environmental conditions before problems occurred.

Our Approach

This engagement exemplified Knowble's Product Co-design and Development capability — a selective, collaborative model where we partner with organisations facing complex operational challenges that demand specialised engineering and domain expertise.

Working alongside the client's operational and environmental teams, and in partnership with leading air quality scientists, Knowble led the end-to-end design and engineering of the platform:

• Domain immersion — embedding with remote operations centres, mine planners, and environmental specialists to understand the real-world workflows and decision points that the platform needed to support
• Scientific integration — partnering with one of Australia's foremost air quality specialists to develop the proprietary processing models that underpin DEE's predictive capability
• Iterative co-design — building and validating the platform in cycles with end users across multiple mine sites, ensuring the solution worked in the field — not just in a demo
• Production engineering — delivering an industrial-grade platform with a programmatic API for sensor, fleet, weather, and geological data ingestion, comprehensive dashboarding, flexible job templating, and secure multi-site deployment

The Solution

DEE is a purpose-built air quality platform that combines sensor, fleet, weather, and geological data through advanced scientific processing to deliver forward-looking dust emissions risk insight. Key capabilities include:

• Proactive risk visibility — months and even years of forward-looking insight, enabling mine planning aligned with seasonal conditions
• Integrated data processing — a programmatic API ingesting multiple data sources, processed through proprietary air quality science
• Operational dashboarding — rich time-series visualisation and trend analysis designed for remote operations centres
• Flexible configuration — customisable job templating and site-specific data requirements, supporting multi-site management in a single deployment
• Automated reporting — templated report generation integrated with the job processing engine

The platform was designed for the people who use it daily — remote operators, mine planners, OCEs, and environmental teams — with an intuitive interface that makes complex air quality data actionable.

Outcomes

• Reactive to proactive — operators moved from responding to dust events after the fact to planning around them before they occur
• Reduced production downtime — forward-looking risk awareness enabled pre-emptive scheduling adjustments, reducing unplanned stoppages
• Strengthened compliance — systematic, data-driven reporting reduced risk against Environmental Assessment requirements
• Improved health and safety — proactive management improved outcomes for workers and surrounding communities
• Multi-site rollout — DEE was deployed across key operational sites for one of the world's largest resource companies