Perth’s Resources Technology Showcase 2019: How Risk Management Technologies is harnessing AI to prevent industrial disasters

West Perth-headquartered Risk Management Technologies is accelerating its application of artificial intelligence, enhancing its well-regarded First Priority platform with “augmented predictive incident capability”.

RMT founder and managing director Dean Apostolou said the company, a quiet achiever in industrial services in Perth, said the new feature would warn clients about significant or catastrophic incidents on the horizon.

“No one expects significant or catastrophic events, yet they continue to occur,” Mr Apostolou said.

“Whether they are one-person fatalities or catastrophic events such as Fukushima, Piper Alpha, Air France 447, Samarco Dam Wall collapse, Deepwater Horizon, or Texas City, the reality remains current technology is incapable to foresee or forewarn despite the unequivocal human, environmental and financial consequences.”

Scientists at RMT say they have harvested diverse data to reinterpret incident precursors. The platform is able to “listen” for warnings amid the noise of unpredictable operating environments.

RTS2019:

• Everything you need to know about the inaugual conference in Perth
• Everything to see and do at the free Resources Technology Showcase exhibition

The digital modelling of the on-the-ground experience of industry leaders is a critical part of the overhaul of First Priority.

“Equally important to identifying these hidden relationships in the data and making predictions is to design a user interface where users can easily interpret the results,” Mr Apostolou said.

“Understanding these hidden relationships enables predictions to be made. RMT is now exploring the prediction of number and severity of events when the equivalent precursors are observed, with a measured accuracy.”

The new platform is scheduled for release early next year.

RMT is a supporting partner of this week’s Resources Technology Showcase 2019 event, which is presented by Seven West Media and held on Wednesday and Thursday at Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre. Mr Apostolou will take part in a panel on Wednesday that will examine the issue of how to scale artificial intelligence out of the innovation lab and into production at scale.

The session will be moderated by PwC director of AI, Rob McCargow. Panellists include:

• CITIC Pacific Mining chief executive Chen Zeng
• Razorlabs chief technology officer Michael Zolotov
• BHP head of improvement minerals Australia Yanni Kotsos
• Woodside Energy chief digital officer Shelley Kalms
• IBM Australia New Zealand managing director Katrina Troughton
• Curtin University deputy vice-chancellor research Chris Moran
• Austrade senior industry expert Roland Stephens