RPMGlobal says it has concluded the first sale of its new parametric design product, Strategic Design Optimiser (SDO), following successful beta testing.

RPM originally announced its intention to develop and release its new intelligent design solution to the market in March 2019 and, at the conclusion of a long partnership with a Canada-based mining customer, RPM’s beta testing program successfully showcased SDO’s ability to model strategic high-level stope and development design harnessing the application’s automated workflow, RPM said.

This successful program concluded with the customer purchasing a licence to use the RPM solution.

The main benefits of using SDO include its ease of use, ability to evaluate strategic scenarios quickly and the ability to analyse more scenarios with robust analysis in decision making, according to the company.

SDO includes the Mine Shape Optimiser (MSO), which generates the first pass development using RPM’s Development Optimiser, eliminating the requirement of the user to draw every part of the mine design, RPM says. This allows end users to perform their strategic design work in one package.

With SDO, users can make small tweaks to designs in one area and have those changes reflected through the rest of the design, a task that would otherwise take days in traditional CAD-based packages as each edit would need to be done manually, according to the company.

RPM Chief Executive Officer, Richard Mathews, said the sale was a reflection of the product team’s dedication to successfully bringing SDO to market through strong partnerships and industry collaboration.

“It’s very pleasing to see SDO gaining traction in the North American market, and we are confident this sale will spur further interest in our leading strategic design packages heading into 2021,” he said.

The company added: “SDO is unique in that it uses parametric design principles, combined with several leading optimisation algorithms, in a single user experience. SDO integrates both the stope and development optimisation into a single package, allowing customers to generate, change and update designs on the fly.”

The design tool emphasises the visualisation of results on plots, graphs and tables, allowing the user to interpret and select with confidence the best scenarios to bring forward for more detailed designs, RPM says.

Strategic options can then be filtered by the scenarios that maximise value and eliminate unviable scenarios early.

Mathews concluded: “RPM remains committed to providing its customers with the most advanced mining technology solutions and our continued investment in the design and scheduling suite will help ensure mine planners continue to unlock new levels of capability.”