RPMGlobal says it has delivered on its commitment to release an innovative design solution to the market before the end of the year, unveiling its Underground Metals Solution (UGMS) Optimiser edition for mine planning customers.
UGMS Optimiser marks the first edition of the company’s agile design software offering, which is fully integrated with the company’s enterprise solutions.
This agile design application uses parameters and automatic design tools to build an optimal mine design for users, according to the company. “The time saved by using automatic design tools facilitates the ability for many alternative designs to be generated for consideration by a mine design user,” RPM said, adding, the user similarly changes whatever parameters they want and then re-runs their model to generate the optimal mine design based on the new parameters.
RPMGlobal Chief Executive Officer, Richard Mathews, said the launch was in keeping with the company’s mission of delivering “innovative end-to-end enterprise solutions for miners”.
He added: “At RPM, we are looking at design differently. We have leveraged the most advanced technologies including the very latest parametric design capabilities that support rapid scenario generation, long-term planning and optimal mine design for our customers.
“This ensures miners continue to drive efficiency and productivity improvements in a visually orientated environment.”
The company’s design solutions will initially be offered to UGMS customers of RPM’s XPAC Solutions software, according to Mathews, but he said it would look to rollout additional design capabilities that extend across its enterprise architecture in the “near future”.
UGMS Optimiser incorporates discrete optimisation tools used in underground metals mine design all in one solution, RPM says.
“This integration enables users to rapidly understand the impact of changes to key economic drivers such as metallurgical grade, mining costs, revenue, foreign exchange, and the roll-on effects these have on accessing the mineral deposits to be mined.”
The design solution uses RPM’s Development Optimiser, “an industry first combination of Planar Underground Network Optimiser and Decline Optimisation Tool (DOT) solutions”, it says, to determine the most economical network of tunnels to access and extract ore on each level of the mine.
Development Optimiser combines both tools in a parametric manner allowing extensive analysis of the deposit based on realistic constraints. The solution also uses Mine Stope Optimiser (MSO) to produce the stope shapes and stope inventories from a block model that spatially represents the location of the mineralisation.
RPM explained: “Depending on the size and mineral variation in the orebody or orebodies, using a manual process of generating the mining shapes to maximise the recovered resource value can take months.
“MSO has taken this manual process of generating the mining shapes based on the deposit size, shape and maximising recovered resource value, and reduced it down to days.”
Other key features, such as direct integration with the scheduler and enterprise solution, automated development creation and high-level financial analysis of the optimised outcome, are differentiators in the market space, according to the company.
Mathews said: “We are the first company to combine and incorporate the three big underground optimisers (Stope Optimisation, Underground Network Optimiser and Decline Optimisation) into one enterprise enabled design product which is a game-changer for the industry.”
This will give companies the ability to quickly evaluate multiple mine design scenarios to achieve profitable outcomes, while saving time on the process, he added.
“However, it is just the beginning, as we continue expanding our design solutions to complete our end-to-end enterprise offering which spans scheduling, simulation, finance, maintenance, operations and design,” he concluded.