Tag Archives: Strategic Design Optimiser

RPMGlobal’s Strategic Design Optimiser gains traction in North America

IoT, Mining services, Mining software, , , , , ,

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.”

RPMGlobal brings automation to underground stope design process

Automation, Communications in mining, IoT, Mining services, Mining software, , , , , , , ,

RPMGlobal says it has released an update to its Parametric Design suite of software products specifically tailored to the underground metals space.

Strategic Design Optimiser (SDO) is an innovative design application that combines the complex tasks of strategic optimised stope and development design into a single, coherent automated process, it says.

The intelligent workflow included in the product guides the user through the entire process. This workflow has been developed using the combined industry knowledge and experience of RPMGlobal and its customers.

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

As a standalone strategic design package, SDO can work seamlessly with any existing design tools and is also offered as a fully integrated end-to-end enterprise solution as part of RPMGlobal’s Underground Metals Solution.

Paul Beesley, RPMGlobal’s Chief Technology Officer, said: “The new solution stayed true to the company’s philosophy of creating new products that fundamentally challenged the status quo of how the industry operates.

“SDO reflects RPMGlobal’s large investment in our expanding design portfolio, announced last year, which is underpinned by a strong drive to accelerate innovation in this area of mine planning.”

While the industry has accelerated its uptake of automation, Beesley said the design part of the mine planning process had been largely left out, with existing solutions simply bolting on more functionality to existing tools.

“We have worked closely with miners to bring this unique offering to the market and remain proud to be leading the development of innovative design technologies that provide a step change in mine design,” he said.

SDO builds on the strengths of the Mineable Shape Optimiser by adding a new visual, user interface that automatically manages the large volumes of data generated for resultant stoping scenarios, RPMGlobal says.

Current solutions still rely on the user manually drawing every part of the mine design. Every single change then requires the user to redraw again and again. What usually happens then is the changes simply do not get done, and, with each iteration, it deviates further from the truth.

The underlying principle of SDO is that design changes to one segment are automatically rippled through to any other affected segments, making the necessary design updates, the company says.

RPMGlobal’s fully integrated Development Optimiser automatically generates the first pass underground development network of crosscuts, footwall drives and connecting declines for the selected strategic stoping scenarios and, through its use of parametric techniques, allows for changes to be made and reflected faster than ever before.

Beesley says RPMGlobal’s design solutions are already transforming how the industry thinks and approaches this critical stage of mine planning.

“At RPMGlobal, we are passionate about providing truly innovative solutions that allow for real change in the mining industry and our increased investment in our design and scheduling suite reflects that commitment.

“SDO is the mining industry’s equivalent of what the spreadsheet did for financial modelling when it replaced double entry bookkeeping. This latest release comes at a very exciting time for the company and is a strong indicator of what lays ahead for our design and scheduling solutions.”