Mine planners evaluate and update several mine plans on a regular basis. Whether you’re designing or scheduling mining activities, the long, medium and short-range mine plans are always evolving. Why shouldn’t you expect the same adaptability from your planning software?
HxGN MinePlan Release 3 2022 brings new features to the software’s Engineering and Geosciences suites, as well as quality-of-life changes to MinePlan 3D and the platform.
Let’s dig past the surface and look at some of the exciting changes!
Maximize schedule value and improve schedule decisions
The MinePlan Engineering Suite sees some of the biggest changes during the update. Engineering offers software packages that can help you to improve efficiency at your mine and make informed decisions by applying timely and accurate data to minimize the variance between plan and execution.
MinePlan Project Evaluator has added more flexibility to the ‘Best Worst’ schedule analysis. The release enables users to specify which grade items to target mineral content and the destination recoveries will be applied based on routing results. This feature offers more schedule resolution and will improve confidence in schedule decisions.
In MinePlan Schedule Optimizer, shovel control now allows users to further constrain optimizations by limiting the number of haulers in a fleet for a particular shovel. The feature complements the recently released option to limit shovel assignment in the advanced constraints dialog.
MinePlan Activity Scheduler’s new ‘Merge’ feature allows users to combine a series of selected activities into one user defined activity. This is extremely useful when trying to meet routing targets. Users can now slice, sequence, route and then easily recombine activities if the equipment advancement direction needs to be changed. Short-range planners will now be able to create alternative scheduling solutions much faster.
The ‘need for speed’ in MinePlan Geosciences
No one wants to spend their time waiting for computations–That’s why we made our Geosciences Suite even faster! This release further empowers geologists to store, manage, and analyze drillhole data so that they can spend more time performing geological interpretation of deposits and generating accurate block models.
Processing times of MinePlan Drillhole Manager’s drillhole and blasthole data have been significantly reduced across all applications accessing drillhole data. This means less time wasted waiting for computations and more time spent being productive and completing resource modeling.
In the Logic workflow tool, users can now filter drillhole data by geometry objects in commonly used procedures including compositing, coding, and interpolation, resulting in greatly improved runtimes. Testing benchmarks of the new release performed more than 10x faster than previous runtimes in some instances.
Several highly requested features have also been added to our GeoLogic implicit modelling solution. This includes subdomains, which can now be modelled for intrusion events in the GeoLogic timeline, providing improved ability to model complex multi-phase intrusive deposits.
Finally, there have been improvements to overall compatibility with outside models and file types. The Model Importer is up to 10 times faster when importing third party block models. There’s also increased compatibility for AutoCAD 2018, allowing for more reliable retention of DXF file properties when converting to an MSR file.
To download the latest version of MinePlan or other product releases, visit the Client Center or contact technical support to find out more about the release. As always, stay tuned to our blog and newsletter to receive future product updates.