Tag Archives: Minemax

Minemax opens up access to mine scheduling software

Minemax has released a new version of its integrated strategic mine planning and scheduling software, Scheduler, that brings advanced scheduling into its cost-effective Lite edition.

Minemax Scheduler 7.0.4 will allow Minemax Scheduler Lite users to model various strategic decisions, previously exclusive to Minemax Scheduler Professional users, according to the company.

“With this added capability, Lite users will be able to model more complex mine planning environments,” it said. Examples of this include modelling multiple processing plants, deciding optimal material paths to various alternative destinations, and determining optimal cutoff grades.

“In all instances, Minemax Scheduler’s scheduling engine analyses these decisions together with the extraction sequence, haulage, stockpiling and blending to generate a plan that honours all constraints,” Minemax said. “This gives mine planners a very powerful tool that evaluates numerous scenarios for their strategic mine plan, all within one single optimisation run.”

Minemax CEO, Joe Kraft, said: “We are very excited about this new development in Minemax Scheduler. With this version, we are making the premier strategic schedule optimisation software more accessible to a range of budgets. This product is a must-have for any mining business seeking to achieve maximum value from their mine strategy.”

In addition, Minemax Scheduler 7.0.4 includes functionality and efficiency enhancements in pit/dump group definition, 3D visualisation and reporting, the company said.

“With respect to performance, the previous CPU core limit has been removed from Minemax Scheduler’s optimisation engine, which can now utilise more CPU cores than before,” it added. “This may result in faster solve times for projects, allowing planners to achieve more in less time.”

Minemax to include pit optimisation, pushback generation tools in Minemax Planner 4.3.4

Minemax has released Minemax Planner 4.3.4 that now integrates both pit optimisation and pushback generation functionality in the affordable Standard Edition.

The Pushback Generation capability, which uses minimum mining width for creating practical pushbacks, was previously exclusive to the Professional Edition users.

“Adding Pushback Generation to the Standard Edition makes this strategic mine planning tool a cost-effective solution for developing optimal strategies through Pit Optimization, Nested Pit Shell Generation and Pushback Generation,” the company says. “The easy-to-use interface with guided workflows allows mine planners to keep the setup and optimisation fast and efficient without the need for additional end user training.”

Minemax CEO, Jim Butler, added: “Industry feedback tells us that Pit Optimization and Pushback Generation often go hand in hand in current mine planning practices. This is why we decided to include Pushback Generation into our more affordable edition of Minemax Planner. We believe this will help mine planners keep their strategic mine planning process smooth and efficient at an affordable price.“

In addition, Minemax Planner 4.3.4. now includes an option to automatically calculate the minimum required number of benches to look up when calculating slope precedences. This helps mine planners develop pit shells with accurately configured slopes in less time and with less effort required, the company says.

Minemax bridges the strategic mine planning and metallurgy divide

Minemax has released Minemax Scheduler 7.0.1 to, it says, help strategic mine planners model mineral processing more accurately.

“Mining companies have had an ongoing need to integrate strategic mine planning with other parts of the business to create realistic high-value mine plans,” the company says. “Recently, Minemax has introduced Minemax Scheduler 7 with Financial Constraints that brings mine planning and finance together into one single platform.”

Scheduler version 7.0.1 is taking another leap forward by addressing the gap between strategic mine planning and metallurgy, Minemax says.

In metal production, the throughput and metal recovery of a processing plant is dependent upon the blend of rock types and grades. Up until now, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to model this with strategic mine planning tools, Minemax says. With Minemax Scheduler 7.0.1, mine planners are now able to model this relationship more accurately, and therefore, develop more reliable strategic mine plans, according to the company.

In addition, Minemax Scheduler 7.0.1 features new Capex functionality that allows mine planners to easily model specific requirements for capital expenditure decisions.

“Firstly, mine planners can now easily determine the optimal time to start a new mining area, associated with capital expenditure such as ground works, infrastructure or road development,” the company said. “This is now modelled in software explicitly in the ‘capital expenditure’ menu without any tedious workaround required. With this framework, it’s just a matter of adding new capital expenditure options and selecting the pit or pits associated with the mining expansion.

“The same steps can be used for starting new dumps. Once the capex set up is done, Minemax Scheduler simultaneously optimises mine schedules with multiple capex decisions to find the optimal solution.”

Secondly, there is often a limit on the number of new trucks purchased per period due to delivery and installation restrictions. Minemax Scheduler 7.0.1 allows mine planners to specify the maximum number of capex instances per period. This is a new addition to the existing Capex functionality, restricting the total number of instances for the entire schedule, the company says.

All maintained and subscribed users can now download Minemax Scheduler 7.0.1 through the Minemax Software Manager and benefit from these new enhancements, the company says.

Minemax’s Tempo 3.0.4 offers open-pit mines further mineral value chain modelling

Minemax believes the enhanced BZ-based scheduling engine of its open-pit mine planning software, Tempo 3.0.4, will find favour with its Minemax Software Manager (MSM) users, delivering high-value schedules quicker than before.

The new version of Tempo is now available to all maintained and subscribed users through MSM.

The Tempo 3.0 release in September 2017 marked the first time BZ-based scheduling (the Bienstock-Zuckerberg algorithm) was available in a commercial mine scheduling solution, according to Minemax.

Since that time, Minemax has extended the scope of Tempo’s BZ-based scheduling to include multiple alternative material destinations, trucking, both block and polygon scheduling and, most recently, products.

“New product and product attribute charts and tabular reports are now available in Tempo 3.0.4. Products, along with their associated attributes, constraints and reports, enable you to more completely model your mineral value chain,” the company said.

For example, in iron ore, products can be used for lump and fines, each with their own prices and blending constraints. In coal, products can be used to combine the outputs of both wash plant and by-pass processing options into multiple saleable blended products. With metals mining, products are used to satisfy monthly metal targets resulting from multiple processing options.

While Minemax believes BZ-based mine scheduling can deliver high-value schedules quickly, the company is also providing a MILP (mixed integer linear programming) “solver option as well for polygon-cut scheduling in Tempo” for those that are yet to be convinced.

Minemax iGantt 5.3 launches with optimisation enhancements

Activity-based open-pit and underground production scheduling is set to get even easier with the launch of iGantt 5.3, according to Minemax.

iGantt integrates Gantt chart, 3D mine visualisation and dynamic reporting into one platform to schedule multiple mining processes.

“This release includes optimisation enhancements as well as improved management of Gantt chart activities through intelligent highlighting of related activities,” Minemax said.

Joe Kraft, General Manager of Minemax Americas, said users need to ensure activity dependencies are correct for a mine schedule to be valid.

“While dependency checking is possible through iGantt’s visual 3D animation of a schedule, our users also wanted to be able to validate specific dependencies in the Gantt chart,” he said. “With version 5.3, they can now do that by clicking on an activity to see preceding and following activities highlighted.”

For iGantt users who have the Optimizer edition, iGantt now has an updated version of the underlying optimisation engine that provides faster “solve times” across a large collection of benchmark datasets. Reporting benefits include export of the activity report into a pivot table format.