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Aerospace Industry Lessons for Mining

Part 1: Enabling flexible production

Boeing, Airbus, Bombardier, Gulfstream, Lockheed Martin, Bell, Sikorsky, Pratt & Whitney. You’ve probably heard of most if not all of them. But they are just a few of the most successful airplane, helicopter, aeronautic engine and systems manufacturers in the world using Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE to design their products.

They have chosen the 3DEXPERIENCE platform because it enables them to use digital twins inside a virtual twin experience to answer several key questions, including:

1. How can we make our production rate flexible enough to quickly adapt to changing market needs and demands?
2. How can we reinvent our supply chain to improve visibility, on-time delivery, and first-time quality?
3. How can we integrate new technologies to improve performance and meet demand while reducing costs?
4. How can we develop a competitive technology and service the portfolio quickly and with minimal risk?
5. How can we deliver on our economic, environmental and social promises?

Digital twin inside a virtual twin experience

A digital twin is the digital prototype of an object — its virtual version.

Virtual twin experiences not only create 3D digital twins, but they also allow users to:

• model, visualize, and simulate entire processes and systems, and
• add in real-world data and feedback to continually inform and improve data.

This series of articles

This series of articles is dedicated to explaining the value of the digital twin in the mining industry by using the aerospace industry as an example. We begin this series with how Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE helped aeronautical giants answer the below question and explain how what the aerospace industry learned can be applied to the mining industry.

How can we make our production rate flexible enough to quickly adapt to changing market needs and demands?

The issue

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the aerospace sector hard and fast. Passenger demand collapsed, and many customers cancelled or deferred orders or switched to smaller models. But then, in 2022 and 2023, the market came roaring back, and experts now estimate that commercial air traffic could double in the next 20 years. But what happens when there is another pandemic or other major crisis?

The aerospace industry realized it must improve its ability to adapt to changing market requirements and demands more quickly than ever. It is the only way it will remain competitive both in the commercial sector and the defence and space sectors, which also continue to be unpredictable, locked in a cycle of increasing or decreasing their spending to respond to rising or diminishing threats and market conditions.

This is where Dassault Systèmes came in …

In the aerospace industry, excess capacity lowers margins, while insufficient capacity can cost millions in lost revenue. As a result, manufacturers continually strive hard (even without a pandemic) to dynamically match their production rates with market pressures.

Manufacturing flexibility improves a company’s ability to:

• react promptly to customer demands, and
• increase production system productivity without incurring unnecessary costs and expending too many resources.

Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform helped our aerospace partners to support flexible production rates by:

• Creating digital continuity

With new technology based on increasingly complex systems arriving nearly every day, the aerospace sector suffered from organizational and technological silos that hampered their ability to use their data effectively.

Moving to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform allowed them to integrate their systems and unify their data from all product stages — design, engineering, manufacturing, and aftersales — in one central place. In turn, that digital continuity allowed them to generate a fluid, uninterrupted flow of information that enabled them to identify and resolve critical pinch points, resulting in reduced lead-time production and increased responsiveness to market changes.

Many mining companies suffer from similar organizational and technological silos. Fusing software and systems so that all stages of resource lifecycle management — from geology and resource modelling to mine planning and design — are linked on a single platform allows mine managers to see all stages of the mining process. The result: greater insight into and control over mine production and a quicker response to changing market forces.

• Limitless “what if” scenarios

Data consolidation/digital continuity also allowed our aerospace partners to create a virtual twin of their manufacturing process. From there, they used their production and supply chain scheduling data together — directly connecting planning with the shop floor — to run thousands of “what if” scenarios.

These scenarios allowed the companies to:

• visualize the effects of small and large adjustments across the product lifecycle
  • analyze data coming in from a process or the product in its real-world usage
  • run additional tests and simulations, and
  • make changes to ensure continuous improvement and prevent unexpected downtime.

This increased manufacturing flexibility, reduced process time, and improved manufacturing quality.

Virtual scenarios can be just as useful in creating production rates in the mining industry that are flexible enough to adapt to changing demands. For example, say you are designing a new pit mine:

• You can first use your virtual twin to simulate and evaluate several different starting points going in many directions to determine the best shape for the pits, and then select the shape with the best pushback dimensions for extracting maximum ore.
• Then you can run thousands of further “what if” scenarios (in a matter of minutes) to develop a production plan that considers such factors as:
  • estimated LOM
  • mining rate
  • location of dump piles, and
  • ramp-ups.
• You can generate thousands of possible sequences from there with different cut-off grades, prices, production capabilities, and corresponding CAPEX. Each possible plan will automatically generate its own NPV, making it easy to see which plan will create the optimal production range.
• Finally, you can project the new mine’s performance over time to select the stope design that will maximize value even in the face of market uncertainty/changes in demand.

Next in this series

Digital continuity, combined with virtual twin experiences, can help mines — as it has in the aerospace industry — gain new insights into their processes and discover new opportunities to match production to demand.

In the next four articles in the Aerospace Industry Lessons for Mining series, I will explain how we helped the aerospace industry answer its other key questions:

• How can we reinvent our supply chain to improve visibility, on-time delivery, and first-time quality?
• How can we integrate new technologies to improve performance and meet demand while reducing costs?
• How can we develop a competitive technology and service portfolio quickly and with minimal risk?
• How can we deliver on our economic, environmental, and social promises?

About the Author 

Diego has over ten years of experience leading digital transformation and mine planning projects for national and multinational organizations. He has an MBA from Universidad Católica de Chile, a Diploma in Supply Chain Management from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, and an Electronics Engineer from Universidad de Concepción.