MICROMINE’s leading exploration and 3D mine design solution – Micromine 2020 – launched in early November, now allows mine planners access to an advanced scheduling tool that can be used for any type of scheduling function.
“Micromine 2020 sees a slew of innovative upgrades and enhancements to our Scheduler module,” said Andrew Esmaili, Micromine Product Analyst.
“The new functionality ensures mine planners have access to all the tools they need to prepare designs, define mining constraints, configure an open pit or underground schedule, and identify optimal mine plans.
For example, a planner can begin by creating a life of mine schedule and use the optimiser to determine an optimal plan. The plan can then be used as the basis for a production schedule incorporating additional operational constraints. This encourages planners to focus on strategic objectives when working on a long-term scenario, and subsequently transfer their results to a production schedule when required.”
Streamlined Scheduling
To maximise profitability, both mine design and plans are constantly revised and updated. This cannot be done without access to the range of advanced design and planning tools.
“The great thing about Micromine is that it is an integrated mine planning and scheduling solution which allows planners to use large datasets to view and interpret geological data, create resource models, run optimisations, prepare mine designs, and create mine plans. The benefit of using such an integrated tool becomes an apparent when data is frequently updated. With Micromine, the headache of transferring data between different applications is virtually omitted.”
The Scheduler relies on the powerful design tools of Micromine Core and Wireframing to generate mining solids. The solids are then interrogated against a block model and coded with attributes to that reflect calculated reserves. These solids are then used to create mining tasks in the scheduler.
“Users have access to an array of advanced 3D design, modelling and analytical tools throughout this entire process” Mr Esmaili continued.
Detailed Operational Scheduling
While long term plans are typically focused on strategic objectives, short to medium term plans require a greater level of detail and the consideration of the different activities in the mining cycle.
New utilities in the 2020 version of Scheduler enable the definition of virtually any activity in a mine. In an underground scenario, a planner may want to account for activities such as drilling, blasting, bogging, ground support, ventilation. Once defined, each activity can be configured with its own unique set of task attributes. Task attributes can be mapped to source wireframes or based on dynamic expression. The addition of dynamic expressions and enhanced support for units and unit conversion is one of the new additions our international userbase will love.
New facilities allow users to define the relationship between the activities. All settings and configurations can now be saved as Micromine form sets which allows for efficiency and repetition.
The scheduler’s reporting tool can be used to produce a series of comprehensive reports on a schedule. These reports can subsequently be passed on to the new report generator to produce customised reports to suit any need.
Optimised plans
Micromine has continued its dedication to providing a cost-effective scheduler by providing users with the option of using an in-built solver that utilizes a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) algorithm to identify an optimal solution or relying on a commercial solver if desired.
A range of new features and improvements
The 2020 scheduler has undergone more development than ever before with a range of new features and enhancements, including:
- A new Gantt with superior performance
- New facility for defining task attributes
- Support for both metric and imperial units
- New facility for generating scheduler tasks
- Support for auxiliary tasks
- Support for Micromine form sets
- New reporting tool
- Support for dynamic expressions
- Enhanced task management facilities; and
- New task visualization and animation options in Vizex.
Micromine 2020, available now, and in addition to the improved Scheduler, boasts a new Stope Optimiser, new charting tools, a new unfolding tool for model interpolation, and advances in the Implicit Modelling and Pit Optimiser modules.
To find our more please contact marketing@micromine.com
