On 2nd June, GEOVIA Senior Industry Process Technical Executive, @GK spoke to the guests and students of the Department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering from Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering (University of Nevada).
Garrett presented on 'Strategic Mine Design', and his talk was well received and attended. Garrett spoke about the fascinating world of mine design software and explore the cutting-edge capabilities of the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
Watch the full session on YouTube, or click below:
Some interesting questions that were asked during the session:
Q) One of your goals is to enhance ESG and sustainability, what if you add a feature in your software tools to quantify the CO2 emissions?
A) It has certainly been in active discussion. We have another IPE - Strategic Mine Planning, and this is where we are actively working over the life of the mine to incorporate CO2 emissions, and how you would optimize these different processes and decisions for each specific mine. When you change one parameter you will see a change in the CO2 emission in the system or the life of the mine. Addressing this in the virtual world, we call it a virtual twin is really the only way to optimize and answer that question. The tools that we are bringing to the market are really game-changing.
Q) Can you give us a time line, of when some of the products will be available for the industry to use?
A) The Surface Mine Designer role is available now, to license on an on-premise or cloud. There is added functionality coming in the future associated with that. In the more complex solutions, like the underground parametric design tools, I would say, that's more of a customized service at this point because it tends to be more complex than some of the open pit templates that we've developed so far.
Q) Is the platform still open for University licensing?
A) Yes, absolutely, we champion and partner with universities.
Q) With this 3DExperience we need a lot of computational resources and I believe the cloud is going to play a big role here.
A) Most of our solutions are cloud-enabled. When you say cloud there's a lot of different jargon and terminologies but I tend to categorize it either on-premise, for clients that are more concerned about security and want to have their own data silo, or their own cloud within the house, and then a true Cloud environment where it's hosted either on our servers or Amazon servers.
Q) I'm curious if we need to replace all the computers in our computer lab or not.
A) I would say not, for example for our truly cloud-enabled solutions you can achieve everything that you need to do with an iPad and so you don't necessarily need a heavy number crunch or a desktop to achieve some of these solutions.
Q) Any plan to somehow bring AI into all these designs?
A) I'm sure that our organization is actively thinking about how we would incorporate that in the parametric mine design. It's not clear to me at this point in time. I think that's probably a question that needs some discussion at various conferences and we'll definitely need input from academics like yourself.
Q) I'm just imagining the ideal world, where lots of users are designing their mines and you have access to data, about how they're designing their lines and then you can use that data to develop AI platforms to put all this knowledge together for a much smarter design.
A) Yes, once you build up a library of templates for a parametric process, it is certainly something that could be achieved relatively easily once that library exists.
Q) Can you elaborate more if there are any plans in the background going on and if we will have more strategic mine planning tools in the industry?
A) Whittle is a very powerful algorithm, specifically for its open pit optimization tools that it's well known for, however, there are R&D efforts to improve on Whittle's algorithms and strategic mine planning tools that are specifically for the open pit optimization type of scenario, and then PCBC for panel cave/block cave type scenarios. There's active R&D within our organization to essentially bring those tools to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Once that is there we will then be able to leverage all of the Multiphysics simulations with the SIMULIA brand and geotechnical simulations to essentially have a multi-brand solution for block cave mine design and mine planning.
We are first translating that functionality of PCBC and Whittle into the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, then we will benefit from all of the other functionalities within the platform and brands within 3DS to make that process smoother, automatic, and essentially apply structured collaboration, project management tools to improve the whole business process in the strategic mine planning world.
Q) There are groups in academia working on bringing stochastic modeling instead of a deterministic look at the design, and bringing down uncertainties of our exploration block models, and even the stochastic nature of other technical parameters, geotechnical parameters, or metallurgical parameters into this lin. But there is no tool in the market incorporating all these things, any plans for this?
A) We are aware of this and we are looking at all these different algorithms and also we're aware of what our competitors are doing. It sounds like a pretty good business opportunity, right? so if you wanted to develop a program or potentially work with an organization like GEOVIA to help develop that program, then it would be a good opportunity within the mining industry.
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