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Internationl Mining July 2011 LR

Mine planning software allows mines to better plan production over the short, medium, and long-term by sequencing blocks based on models and inputs. However, marrying strategic long-term plans with daily and monthly variability can be challenging. Unforeseen issues like equipment failures, grade changes, and weather can disrupt scheduled production. The best software is adaptable to changes while still efficiently managing long-term plans. Modern software provides comprehensive solutions across management, scheduling not just mining but processing and incorporating equipment availability. There is also a trend toward standardizing software and approaches across mine sites.

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47 views1 page

Internationl Mining July 2011 LR

Mine planning software allows mines to better plan production over the short, medium, and long-term by sequencing blocks based on models and inputs. However, marrying strategic long-term plans with daily and monthly variability can be challenging. Unforeseen issues like equipment failures, grade changes, and weather can disrupt scheduled production. The best software is adaptable to changes while still efficiently managing long-term plans. Modern software provides comprehensive solutions across management, scheduling not just mining but processing and incorporating equipment availability. There is also a trend toward standardizing software and approaches across mine sites.

Uploaded by

Kenny Casilla
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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MINE PLANNING SOFTWARE

ine scheduling software allows mines to better plan for the short, medium and long-term through production sequencing based on block models and a myriad of other inputs. The complication is that marrying strategic long term plans with the variation seen on a day to day and monthly basis can be very tricky, while there are also major differences between the approach used in surface and underground mining. Unscheduled equipment downtime, unexpected changes in grade/geology, and even unforeseen climate extremes, can all throw scheduled production off the long term track, sometimes to a point where senior management may have difficulty understanding why particular blips in production have occurred. No matter what the original inputs and presumptions were in the original long-term schedule, in reality, shortterm plans can be affected by a seemingly unlimited set of variables. The best mine scheduling is elastic and adaptable to these types of unforeseen changes on a day to day basis, while still efficiently managing the longer term scheduling on a metal accounting basis. Whereas in the past, software was mainly relied upon to create mine designs such as open pit shells, mine-planning software is now required to offer a comprehensive solution across the management hierarchy a schedule that considers not just when blocks are mined, but how they are processed, as well as incorporating information on equipment availability. There is also a growing trend with larger companies toward corporate standardisation, both in terms of their software choices and the way this software is used. The adoption of a standardised approach to scheduling ensures consistency across different mine sites and planning horizons, whilst increasing the flexibility of planning staff.

of the software, and includes a broad range of enhancements to usability that make scheduling more streamlined and simpler than before. With the software, engineers can rapidly reproduce scenarios across development and production with a single mouse click to efficiently compare scheduling alternatives. Combined results can be viewed in MineScheds unique dashboard to analyse the schedule. Marni Rabass, Director of Product Management comments: MineSched 7.0 further simplifies the creation of scheduling scenarios by combining development and production scheduling into a seamless workflow, enabling better overall schedules to be produced. It also combines interactive and automated scheduling to saving engineers time, allowing them to leverage the power of automation and make schedule adjustments selectively by period. This, coupled with the software's ability to enable engineers to selectively schedule period by period to saves significant time in schedule creation. Engineers can also pause scheduling at any time to view the results up to the last full period scheduled and resume scheduling from any period negating the need to rerun the entire schedule. The latest offering from Gemcom, Gemcom Hub, which is a data management optimisation solution, also has relevance to scheduling and planning on a support basis. Kevin Ward, Product Manager for Gemcom

Hub comments: Planning processes evolve at a given site to match the particular needs of the operation and the organisation. A prescribed workflow from a vendor would almost certainly not work in the general case, as workflows invariably involve multiple people and / or teams. This drives the need to manage two specific points first a clear view of which file version is the correct one especially if there are what-if scenarios being compared and secondly, a clear hand-off between potentially multiple users of the data. Gemcom Hub works with any file type, so doesnt restrict the users to a specific application tool set. It also provides data centralisation and rigidly enforces a Single Version of the Truth (SVOT). Clear visibility of version changes to the files affecting a given user, as well as the ability to lock files to avoid conflicts provide a robust yet easily accessed toolset to implement the workflow that makes sense at a given operation. Versioning allows access to previous models and scenarios in a controlled and auditable manner without the end users having to face the confusion of several similarly named files or folders. Many operations are remotely located, meaning that they are often dealing with poor communications infrastructure. To overcome this, Hub has been specifically designed to cope with transferring large files from remote locations over potentially poor or even intermittent communications channels.

Gemcom
Gemcoms main scheduling-specific offering is MineSched, which according to the group provides scheduling for surface and underground mines of all sizes and types, improving productivity and profits beyond what is possible in manual scheduling. Engineers can easily create scenarios by using its 3D graphical canvas to setup material flows, blending targets and underground stope precedence, for example. They can also quickly compare multiple scenarios with its configurable and visually appealing scheduling dashboard. MineSched 7.0 is the most current version
Image: MineScheds interactive scheduling canvas

54 International Mining JULY 2011

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