With the release of Micromine 2016, the latest version of MICROMINE’s exploration and 3D mine design solution, features have been implemented and overhauled to assist with underground mine design. These new and improved features have been designed for ease of use and allow users to take advantage of the intuitive tools of Micromine for underground mine design.
Micromine now boasts enhanced scheduling tools to assist with mine design. Powerful scheduling tools are notorious for being extremely expensive and often difficult to master. Micromine 2016 seeks to address these problems by incorporating an enhanced schedule optimiser within the Scheduling module that provides engineers with the means to identifying an optimal mine plan.
The schedule optimiser is a mathematically proven Mixed Integer Programming (MILP) solver that is able to provide engineers with the optimal extraction sequence. This process is based on a concept of maximising an objective, such as ore tonnes, which Micromine then converts into an optimisation model that can be optimised by the MILP solver.
This highly intuitive yet simple workflow is based on 3D solid wireframes. The solids are interrogated against a block model while material quantities and qualities are calculated and written on the wireframe as attributes. When the wireframes are imported into the scheduler, they can be sequenced and optimised.
Micromine 2016 has also enhanced the Grade Tonnage Reporting tool which now allows users to define and report on a number of material types. The scheduler provides dedicated functionality embedded into different underground mine design project types for life of mine and short term schedulers. This was done to prepare data to generate an optimised life of mine solution and then use the solution as the base for a more detailed mine plan.
Micromine’s long term scheduler can use any number of variables and an optimisation objective and then aim to find an optimal solution out of all of the possible outcomes. The optimiser will endeavour to maximise discounted Net Present Value (NPV) as soon as possible.
The release of Micromine 2016 has seen comprehensive changes to underground mine design. The new and enhanced features aim to deliver improved flexibility, functionality and performance by utilising the powerful tools within Micromine 2016 to do the work for you. Designing your mine is now easier than ever thanks to Micromine.