Effective Remote Operations Control for Copper Mining

MIT 16.422 Human Supervisory Control of Automated Systems

September 2025 - December 2025

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Human-Machine Interaction, Automated System Interface Design, Situational Awareness, Cognitive Load, Measuring Performance of Automation, Conducting Interviews

Integrated Remote Operations Centers (IROCs) enable centralized monitoring and decision-making across geographically distributed mining processes. Traditional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) focused on copper quantity and quality do not adequately reflect the IROC’s impact on operational effectiveness. Through qualitative interviews with managers and operators and analysis of alarm data, this group project identified key challenges, including alarm overload, inconsistent trust in automation, and uneven operator workload. Based on these findings, a human-centered KPI framework was proposed that evaluates IROC performance through situational awareness, trust, and workload. These metrics provide a more direct way to assess operator effectiveness and the
overall success of remote operations.

This is a group project, and I took part in conducting offsite interviews, developing our central claim, and creating a report and presentation to communicate our findings.

This project recieved high marks and positive feedback from the course instructor and our peers in class. It was also well recieved by the copper mining company we worked in collaboration with.

While we tend to think of humans and machines at opposite ends of the autonomy spectrum, this class reminded me that systems are most effectively designed when considering how machines and humans can work together collaboratively. It was also an important learning experience in diving into an entirely new application domain - mining - where I needed to find a balance between listening to interveiewees that had hand-on experence in the field and coming up with my own ideas that incorporate my background in autonomy.