Mining giant Rio Tinto has renewed its enterprise agreement with AI firm Palantir. The agreement extends the enterprise agreement for an additional four years and provides Rio Tinto access to the Palantir Artificial intelligence Platform (AIP).

Rio Tinto was an early adopter of Palantir Foundry. The company has already created a Palantir Ontology, or digital twin. Building on the existing Ontology, AIP will enable Rio Tinto to build and deploy AI applications faster.

From managing plant operations to monitoring geotechnical risk to coordinating dozens of unmanned trains carrying iron ore, Foundry is enabling Rio Tinto to make well-informed decisions and take appropriate actions based on a single, unified source of truth.

For Network Specialists and Train Controllers in the RTIO Operations Centre in Western Australia, Foundry provides a view of Rail operations assembled from real-time data from hundreds of equipment units and systems in the value chain. With the Ontology providing a unified view of all assets, Network Specialists coordinate the haulage of iron ore by 53 driverless trains, each with 240 wagons, across the Pilbara rail network. They can optimise, collaborate on, and execute complex routing decisions to balance production targets and maintenance needs. As a result, both railway throughput and safety have been improved.

In Mongolia, Foundry equips Rio Tinto with a dynamic understanding of geotechnical risk at Oyu Tolgoi, one of the world’s deepest and largest block cave mines. The mine’s conditions require advanced risk management and constant surveillance to ensure safe production. The Ontology Rio Tinto has configured in Foundry integrates data from thousands of sensors across the mine and serves as a single source of information for cave health, instrumentation and risk. This has enabled adjacent workflow innovations which will be expanded through Palantir AIP.

“We have high expectations for Rio Tinto’s utilisation of Palantir’s AI Platform (AIP) based on what they have already achieved with Foundry and their ambition for secure use of AI. The Ontology created by Rio Tinto’s team in Foundry over the past three years enables fast deployment of AI solutions to some of Rio Tinto’s most pressing challenges and ensures best and safe operator practice in areas like risk identification, asset management, and supply chain order and fulfilment processes,” said Ted Mabrey, Palantir’s Head of Commercial.

“Foundry has helped to transform the parts of our business where it has been applied. In our most high-stakes environments, we are empowering our people to find better ways of working, to improve how we operate our assets, increase performance and to innovate. The Foundry Ontology has made our structured data accessible, and AIP is doing the same for our unstructured data while enabling us to attack with pace problems previously deemed too complex,” said Bold Bataar, Rio Tinto’s Chief Commercial Officer.