Parametric Design: Solving Unconventional Problems
Mining companies increasingly are looking at unconventional ways to solve conventional design problems. Mineral demand, access to capital investments, and sustainability are all trends driving the mining industry and its need to look beyond the conventional design approach. Applying a parametric design approach allows mining companies to respond with agility to changing market and mining conditions.
Working near the physical human limits of deep mining, engineers face significant challenges: complex vein geometry, rock bursts, gas outbursts, deformations, squeezing rocks and high temperatures.
Such environments demand not just innovative technical solutions, but the ability to rapidly explore various options and test novel ideas. To evaluate more mine design ideas quickly, design workflow must be accelerated. One way to speed up design is to automate the process through a parametric design approach. This concept has been grabbing the attention of major mining companies from across the world.
The Challenge: Quickly Generate Multiple Designs
Often mining companies face similar problems. The time it takes to perform a single design update can take months, which limits a company’s ability to test multiple scenarios. On top of this, often having the skilled labour to create the designs is in short supply, or this skilled labour would be better utilized in other aspects of the mining project. So major mining companies have been looking for alternatives to conventional approaches to design workflows, because those techniques are prohibitively slow, especially given the deposit and engineering complexity scale.
Companies are looking to be able to develop multiple design options and permutations quickly -- minutes or hours instead of weeks and months -- so that engineers and planners could evaluate various approaches quickly.
Mining companies have worked with Dassault Systèmes to build out design templates to solve design problems which aren’t easily solved with legacy General Mine Planning software.
The image above, shows how parameters can be used, to quickly update the mine design.
The Solution: Model Creation
The objective of these engagements is first to understand the design problem, the potential inputs, design parameters and the desired outputs of the model. For example, the design problem for one mining company was that they wanted to quickly generate multiple designs of slot access geometry for its cut and fill mine, so that they could be quickly used down-stream in a tactical mine planning software tool. Another company, looked to quickly (within minutes) update the mine design process based on a new set of optimized stope shapes, while another mining company looked to automate the generation of ore development in a highly variable orebody.
For each of these problems, we must first understand the objective of the model, whether it’s using the tunnel lengths for scheduling, automating the development design and comparing orebody recovery, or quickly generating a new mine design within minutes rather than weeks. We then determine the inputs or parameters that will control the model. These controls could be new optimized stope shapes, input data files, or design parameters such as an orebody offset or level spacing.
These models are created using the mining company’s specifications, with constant validation of the model output throughout the duration of the project. The result of these models is that any update to the inputs or parameters automatically updates the mine design in minutes. By using a parametric design approach, planners and engineers gained the ability to produce multiple scenarios very quickly. It also allows design knowledge to be captured within the templates instead of the brains of individual engineers. This removes the subjectivity of the design between planners and engineers and ensures that the designs are replicable.
Solving Unconventional Problems
The advantage of parametric mine design is its ability to solve problems that are traditionally extremely labour intensive with General Mine Planning tools. It requires engineers and designers to look beyond their traditional mine design process and workflows, to see patterns and automatable workflows. It requires the use of algorithms, which can solve design problems in minutes, what conventionally took weeks for engineers to do.
The complexity of mining today is not limited to the tremendous geological forces underground. Domestic and foreign demand for mineral resources continually rise while the availability of land and labour diminish each year. Competition, regulatory constraints and stricter laws are growing along with material costs. Environmental and social accountability have become non-negotiable.
Sophisticated, scientific mine planning techniques that let operators evaluate multiple design options rapidly can help improve chances that safe, efficient, profitable, environmentally responsible mining operations can continue producing valuable mineral resources throughout the entire life of a mine.
Parametric design can help improve short-range planning and production scheduling that maximizes long-range economic potential throughout the life of a mineral deposit. Parametric design can be used to articulate a multitude of possible scenarios to evaluate, which becomes increasingly useful as the industry concentrates into increasingly larger, more complex physical plants to reduce unit costs.
In the next and final post in this series, we look at parametric design more broadly and the integral role it plays in sustainable mining.
Christina LUDWICKI is a Mining Industry Process Consultant at Dassault Systèmes GEOVIA with 15 years of experience in Industry and Consulting. Christina holds a BEng in Mining Engineering from Dalhousie University. Throughout her career, she has worked in various aspects and methods within the mining industry, from mine planning in narrow vein gold mines, to feasibility studies of large Block Caves and Sub-level Caves. Christina is now focused on developing cross brand synergies across the DS portfolio to deliver maximum value to the mining industry.
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