MINING SOFTWARE
“ Capitalising on Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE Mine and its extensive portfolio of mining software, as well as Whittle Consulting’ s reputation and experience in the area of Integrated Strategic Planning, the collaboration provides solutions such as crossfunctional facilitation, sophisticated modelling techniques and optimisation software to improve customer cash flow and NPV of a customer’ s entire mining value chain.”
Whittle Consulting is assisting in the sale and implementation of the Standard and Advanced SIMO Modules – which have previously been considered advanced / specialised techniques – that are now available for mainstream use.
“ This is the most significant release of strategic mine planning software in years,” says Gerald Whittle, Whittle Consulting’ s CEO.“ Whittle Consulting has refined the optimisation engine behind SIMO and perfected its use by applying it to over 100 mining projects and operations over a ten-year period. This is stable, proven technology that generates outstanding results.”
New developments at MICROMINE
Micromine 2016, released in May 2016 by MICROMINE, enables users to capture, manage and interpret critical data, and is relevant to all stages of the mineral extraction process.
“ Micromine provides explorers with an indepth understanding of their project so they can target prospective regions more effectively, increasing the chance of a project’ s success. It gives miners easy-to-use modelling, estimation, planning and design tools to simplify day-to-day production tasks.”
Micromine 2016 incorporates several surface and underground mine planning-oriented enhancements, including: n Auto Build Pit and Auto Re-align Pit Strings for rapidly prototyping and adjusting open pit designs n Integrated pit optimisation charting and reporting tools for displaying and reporting optimisation results directly within Micromine n A collection of tools for creating underground mine development solids from 2-D or 3-D linework( such raw survey data or CAD drawings) n An all new long-term( production) scheduler, which complements the existing short-term n A long-term schedule optimiser that uses industry-standard linear programming solvers to optimise mining extraction Micromine 2016 also included implicit modelling enhancements( including varying structural trends), and numerous utilities and workflow enhancements. The Service Pack 5 for Micromine 2016 was available for download as of December 2016.“ Many of the updates are Core features that benefit every user, not just those with extra modules. They include simple timesavers like being able to drop any supported file into Micromine from an outside location, and a Project Explorer pane that provides direct access to all of the files in a project.”
THe Service Pack 4.7 of Pitram 2015 was also released in December 2016 which contained a variety of new administrator options: data acquisition, enter measures dialogue and display measures, reference data editor, shift planner, as well as a number of enhancements and bug fixes based on the feedback received from Pitram users.
“ With the release of Service Pack 4.7, Pitram enables both underground and surface operations to reduce costs, increase productivity and improve safety and business intelligence.” Major features included: n Administrator Options provide a consistent way to access restricted options for client applications such as Data Acquisition and the Event Editor n The Enter Measures dialogue has been enhanced to include favourites that allow measures across different tabs to be selected as favourites and then grouped together on the same tab, thus providing greater user efficiency, when a combination of measures on different tabs need to be entered frequently n Major Shift Planner functionality including auto-complete location field for equipment task when equipment changed and from ' new task ' option, use of location of primary equipment for secondary equipment task, automatic assignment of location based off the equipment and implement removal of notes in task n Equipment measures are displayed even if the related Equipment Measure attribute is not deployed, in version 4.7 this has been changed so that if the value is not set, the measure will not be displayed for equipment n Scheduled Reporting; the dependency on Crystal reports has been removed and is no longer required. Instead, the SAP Crystal Reports runtime engine must be installed: n 32-bit Crystal Reports runtime engine needs to be installed on the server where the IIS server with the Pitram Portal web client are running n 64-bit Crystal Reports runtime engine needs to be installed on the machines where Data Acquisition is installed. MICROMINE told IM that the Pitram development team is currently working on Pitram 4.8 which is scheduled for release in early 2017 with Pitram 5 planned for late 2017.
Moving on to Geobank 2017, MICROMINE’ s Product Strategy Manager, Mark Gabbitus said,“ Geobank 2017 is the culmination of a lot of hard work by the product team recently to get new features, improved user experience and client requests out to all our clients, and we believe that the new Sample Tracker functionality is going to be a real winner.”
The new and improved sample tracker enables batch loading or lab data, essential at operations with onsite labs, as well as several automated features designed to reduce configuration and management for the database administrators.
Demonstrating its commitment to markets outside of Australia the new Excel lab file importer is set to help clients in Russia, a huge emerging market for Geobank, Micromine and Pitram.“ This is something our Russian clients have asked for and we have delivered” said Gabbitus.“ The labs over there traditionally provide sites with analysis results in multi tab Excel spread sheets. In the past, this required the database administrator to export the data to CSV and then import. Now it’ s set and forget.”
The company adds that one of the big focus areas for Geobank 2017 has been improving the user experience“ and many small but cumulatively exciting new features speak to that mission. Improved workflows, reports and dialogs mean that the administrator and general users day to day experience of Geobank will be significantly enhanced.”
More Pitram and Geobank potential
Future developments for Pitram include short interval planning optimisation. Plans and schedules are created regularly to ensure the mine and its assets collaborate in such a way that the mine advances in a safe, calculated, proven and productive manner. Unfortunately, circumstances occasionally prohibit this from occurring – machines breakdown, material is not blasted correctly, material grade is varied, people are sick … the list goes on.
“ Often planners, grade controllers and other technical staff maintain a spreadsheet with rolling 36 h plans, maintenance breakdowns and grade requirements. However, these spreadsheets often only dictate the desired outcome, rather than the way to achieve this, let alone if an interruption occurs. It is then left to personnel to make rash decisions and opt for the simplest answer, without the knock-on effects considered … short term interval control( SIC) will allow a mine to forward plan and schedule as normal, however, each element of that is scrutinised on a real-time basis. SIC provides insight into how operations are tracking in accordance with the plan and feeds information back to deliver realistic outcomes. Interruptions are captured and alternate scenarios can be planned in such a way that assets will move on to the next task, as if there was no interruption. The SIC provides the mine a way to deliver the desired outcome based on locations, machines and personnel, to ensure that mining is conducted in way that it is predictable. The predictability allows analysis to make incremental
30 International Mining | FEBRUARY 2017