DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE:PLTR) comments today on news announced by Rio Tinto in October that a major milestone had been reached at its Kemano T2 (“KT2”) tunnel project in British Columbia, Canada. The tunnel boring machine (“TBM”) had broken through to complete the excavation stage of a second tunnel to carry water into the Kemano Powerhouse. This second tunnel ensures the long-term reliability of the power supply for Rio Tinto’s British Columbia (BC) Works smelter in Kitimat and will allow Rio Tinto to conduct repairs and maintenance on the existing tunnel without shutting down operations. The project, expected to be finished in the second half of 2022, allows Rio Tinto to continue to produce some of the world's lowest carbon aluminum.
Effective tunnel boring relies heavily on sensor data and the close management of boring advance rates and tunnel ring-building for the structure of the newly excavated area. There needs to be continuous communication, transferred through shift handovers, between on-the-ground teams and the control room. Palantir’s Foundry platform integrates this diverse data, in near real time, into a common operating picture for the various teams. Beyond translating TBM sensor data into actionable insights, Palantir Foundry allows the Kemano site teams to understand the cause of a number of delays at a glance.
In the three months preceding the completion of the excavation stage, and after a pause in work necessitated by COVID-19, Rio Tinto deployed Palantir Foundry to help achieve a 150% improvement on its excavation rate (measured in meters daily) - a significant productivity improvement. Palantir Foundry has helped the Kemano site teams improve their operational processes - with ring-build times significantly reduced by the end of the project and materially decreasing excavation delays by optimizing cycle times.
Palantir Foundry is also hosting and operationalizing three third-party machine learning vision models. These models, developed for Rio Tinto, help predict the arrival times of the train servicing the TBM. Integrating these models into the common operating picture enables Rio Tinto’s engineers to optimize the timing of maintenance.
About the Kemano Tunnel 2 (KT2)
The Kemano Tunnel 2 (KT2) tunnel is 7.6 km long, and is excavated by a 6.56-meter-diameter Herrenknecht Tunnel Boring Machine. A Rio Tinto video of the excavation breakthrough at Kemano may be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXSBVWfkSWw [nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com]
About the Rio Tinto-Palantir Enterprise Relationship
The deployment of Palantir Foundry at Kemano is one of many projects taking place within the multi-year enterprise contract announced by Rio Tinto and Palantir in February this year - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210128005373/en/Palantir-Technologies-and-Rio-Tinto-Sign-Multi-Year-Enterprise-Partnership [nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com]
About Palantir Technologies
Palantir Technologies Inc. builds and deploys operating systems for the modern enterprise. Additional information is available at https://www.palantir.com.
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Forward-Looking Statements
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