A new update to this MineSight planning solution is the latest in a busy year of improvements. It comes ahead of the publication in February of International Mining’s February review of mine planning software.
Block model scheduling is now a part of MineSight Schedule Optimer, (MSSO) following the release of MSSO Version 9.3 by Hexagon Mining. MineSight is Hexagon Mining’s comprehensive modelling and mine planning software platform. MSSO is popular product for short, medium, and long-term planning. It determines the most productive cut mining sequence to achieve the highest project profitability, and then generates practical schedules.
Block model scheduling allows you to import a range of blocks from a block model, and aggregate the blocks into full-bench scheduling units or smaller scheduling units by defining the number of blocks in each direction. Planners can generate schedules by importing blocks from the model and obtain a more accurate cycle time from a block to each destination. Scheduling results can be written back to the block model for validation and downstream production scheduling and operations.
Version 9.3 includes a standalone package option, which includes a MineSight Project Viewer for users to visualise the geometries and scheduling results, and select or digitise a ramp, lead line, road, and point, etc.
This release follows closely on the heels of Version 9.2, which allows users to specify the period availability of haulage roads. If a road becomes unavailable in a period, the scheduler will automatically pick another road that leads to the optimal schedule. Version 9.2 allows the definition of variable wait, spot, and dump time by destinations to consider the different geometric condition of each destination.
End of Period (EOP) maps can be generated for pits and dumps in Version 9.2. EOP maps include surfaces and/or solids (incremental or aggregated by period). Other improvements in 9.2 include Item Weighted Average (IWA), full report templates, and more accurate in-pit haul path cycle time calculation.
In response to customer feedback, Hexagon Mining delivered 10 releases of MineSight Schedule Optimizer in 2015, with about 30 new features. The company says “2016 promises to be just as busy!”