Autonomous intelligence for mining productivity: a multi-agent AI approach to operational value creation
Abstract: Integrated Remote Operation Centres (IROCs) are emerging as the architectural frontier of Industry 4.0 for capital-intensive sectors such as mining, oil and gas, and energy. Yet two intertwined gaps constrain their evolution towards full autonomy. First, no integrated agentic architecture has been proposed for mining IROCs that orchestrates Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems, digital twins, predictive analytics and human-machine interfaces under safety-critical constraints. Second, no evaluation framework jointly addresses the real-time, Health-Safety-Environment, regulatory-auditability and cost-per-decision requirements that govern industrial agentic deployments. This paper makes four contributions. It synthesises industry needs and quantified gains documented in analogous industries that motivate an agentic approach to mining IROCs. It introduces EI2ROC, a three-tier multi-agent architecture combining a Large Language Model orchestrator with specialised monitoring and production-capacityprediction agents communicating through a Model Context Protocol-style tool interface. It provides a critical review of agentic evaluation along six orthogonal dimensions and identifies the industrial blind spot of current benchmarks. Finally, it proposes a multi-dimensional benchmarking framework for industrial agentic AI comprising scenario library, harness, metrics and humancalibration protocol. The paper states explicitly which components are implemented in the current prototype, which belong to the proposed reference design and which remain future work, and reports preliminary cost and latency observations from an operating site. Together, EI2ROC and the benchmarking framework constitute a methodological blueprint transferable across CAPEX intensive industries.