Professor Peter Knights

School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering

University of Queensland

Prof Peter Knights’ research interests are in: Mine maintenance management, Mine operations and process control, Mining simulation, Mining equipment automation

Peter Knights is BMA Chair and Professor and Head of the Division of Mining Engineering within the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering.

From 1996 to 2004 he was employed as an Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Engineering of the Catholic University of Chile, based in Santiago, Chile. He was subsequently named as Associate Professor and Canadian Chair in Mining. Peter holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering for the University of Melbourne, Australia, a Masters degree in Systems Engineering from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Mining Engineering from McGill University, Canada.

For the past twenty-five years Peter’s research work has focussed on maintenance and reliability engineering. He is best known for: promoting the now widespread use of logarithmic scatter plots (also known as jack-knife diagrams) to characterize and prioritize downtime events; for his industry training courses on Root Cause Failure Analysis and for developing pragmatic approaches to RCM.

His recent work has focussed on mine data analytics and the reliability and planning issues associated with novel mining systems. He has a number of maintenance publications in prestigious international journals such as the Journal for Quality in Maintenance Engineering and the Journal of Reliability Engineering and System Safety.