Scientists at the National University of San Luis (UNSL) have created software designed for the province of Santa Cruz that is used to control that mining companies comply with water, air and soil parameters required by national and provincial laws. Together with a company of geological consultants and mining engineers, they developed the platform called CyMA Santa Cruz, which was launched in May and has a monitoring methodology that did not exist in Latin America. The innovative component of the tool is the single database model for all companies, which makes it useful for this type of reporting.
“The idea for this platform came from a need of the Mining Department of Santa Cruz. The province has a large number of mining deposits, from which it periodically receives reports on environmental monitoring, water, soil and air monitoring.with a great variety of parameters, with different characteristics”, says Veronica Gil Costadirector of the work on behalf of the UNSL.
Due to the volume of information they regularly received, it was impossible to process it completely and in a timely manner. To solve the problem, a multidisciplinary team made up of specialists in geology, mining and information technology was assembled to carry out the project.
Cyma has three main functionsone for loading information, another for warnings and the last one for displaying statistics with graphical panels. The first allows you to load all the data referring to the companiesthe parameters you want to control and the provincial, national and international laws you want to apply for your surveillance.
The second is an alert system that allows Santa Cruz to determine which companies submit the corresponding reports in certain time periods.. This is done automatically and speeds up the processing time of the documents that are stored for internal registration.
Lastly, the third function is linked to the presentation of statistics that show the performance of companies. In this way, the Provincial Mining Secretariat can analyze the evolution of these data historically and detect if there is any anomalous behavior to carry out the corresponding study.
“We are talking about hundreds of parameters that are informed in these reports for different types of monitoring, which becomes very difficult manually. By doing it through a platform and visually representing them, you can make a much more complete and faster analysis.”, explains the PhD in Computer Science and professor at the Department of Mines at UNSL.