Interplaying of industry 4.0 and circular economy in cyber-physical systems towards the mines of the future

Today's Industry 4.0 (I4) is re-designing industrial activities and re-shaping communities into the so-called Society 5.0 (S5), enabling the creation of a new industry-societyenvironment nexus. The application of novel technologies such as pervasive sensing, widespread internet of the things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics aims to sense, calculate, and actuate by employing data-driven architectures and automated decisions for reaching more efficient processes that reduce environmental impacts and transform manpower workloads. This work introduces a cyber-physical system (CPS) towards more innovative operations within the mining industry's mine-to-mill process, whereby the operations’ decision-making and executions are often done by human intelligence. However, the increasing use of autonomous machines or mechatronics (MEC) such as trucks, drills, drones, and conveyor belts, combined with advanced modelling and solving algorithms (MSA), can achieve the necessary autonomous operations for handling such hazards and harsh environments, where no or reduced manpower is required. For that, information and computing technologies (ICT) facilitate innovative solutions to re-shape and re-design production systems. The interplaying of advanced technologies of the I4 mandate and circular economy (CE) ideology towards the mines of the future creates a smart connected mining industry that embeds vast amounts of data into predictive and fully integrated intelligent systems. This paper discusses how I4’s technological developments in mining sector applications generate opportunities to re-design and re-execute stockpiling to conveyor-belt processes into enhanced production states from a CE perspective (environmental, economic, and social). CE theories within I4-S5 offer innovative sustainable industrial concepts driven by safer, more environmentally friendly towards precision and autonomous mining.