May/June 2013 - The ASIA Miner

Mine Design
CAE Moves Deeper into Mining
A relatively recent entrant into the mine-design
software market, in the past CAE has perhaps
been better known world-wide for its simulator
and training technology. However, the company’s
purchases of Datamine and Century
Systems Technologies has increased its interest
in the mining sector, such that it now has
a dedicated business area, CAE Mining.
CAE Mining supplies software tools for underground
mine planning, including Mine2-4-
D and its successor, CAE Studio 5-D Planner.
The company’s Mineable Reserves Optimizer
(MRO) package determines the optimal mining
envelopes within which stopes should be
designed, and can be used for preliminary
underground reserve estimation. The Mineable
Shape Optimizer (MSO) automatically
produces optimized stope designs that maximize
the value of recovered ore within the
given geometry and design constraints. It
supports massive, sub-vertical and flat horizontal
deposits and can quickly generate individual
stope designs within a resource
model, CAE Mining says.
In terms of access design, Mine Layout Optimizer
(MLO) produces optimal decline designs
to satisfy access requirements and
design criteria. The company suggests that
this can be valuable with rapid engineering
during the analysis stages of a project, as well
later once designs become more detailed.
Hard Dollar says its Project Cost Management (PCM) package enables mining companies to make project decisions
that avoid cost overruns.
evaluate off-shore mineral resources, has
adapted Vulcan 3-D modelling software for its
exploration on 26 mining leases off-shore
Nome, Alaska. Vulcan GeoModeller provides
a complete set of tools for exploration and
mining geologists, and can be used on both
stratigraphic and non-stratigraphic deposits.
The Vulcan platform allows users to do resource
modelling, mine planning and reconciliation
in the same environment.
Hard Dollar: Counting Cash Where it Counts
As noted earlier, plenty of mining companies are
feeling the combined effects of soaring capex
costs, upward pressures on operating costs
and uncertainties over commodity markets. In a
presentation given in April last year, Scottsdale,
Arizona-based Hard Dollar commented that
“mining companies must take measures to
manage cash flow and conserve spending,
while ensuring that projects stay on schedule.”
The company went on to point out that controlling
costs and managing mining resources
requires a robust tool, suggesting that its Project
Cost Management (PCM) package removes
common hurdles from cost controls,
allowing mining companies to make project
decisions that easily avoid cost overruns.
While not specifically a mine design package,
PCM provides a way of producing detailed,
timely project status data, the company states.
These data immediately show what was estimated
and budgeted, versus actual project performance.
Through customizable daily reports,
an entire project overview is displayed, clearly
showing variances and forecasts at completion.
In July 2012, Hard Dollar teamed up with
Canadian company CAE to include its PCM
in CAE Mining’s mine design, planning and
scheduling software suite. “Hard Dollar’s integration
with the new CAE Studio 5-D Planner
provides customers transparent delivery
of cost and productivity throughout the entire
project lifecycle,” the companies said at the
time, while pointing out that by integrating the
two products in an industry first, they had
provided users with the opportunity to merge
mine design, scheduling, financial and productivity
modelling for both study and operational
environments. According to Hard
Dollar, PCM can reduce the time it takes to
build, plan, deliver and forecast cost and productivity
by more than 300%, while increasing
profits by 15% or more
Good Designs Save Time and Money
With so much pressure on exploration and
mining companies to bring projects on
stream in a cost-effective, timely manner,
while working in increasingly remote and
often logistically challenging environments, it
is hardly surprising that there is a strong market
for comprehensive software tools that can
take some of the risk out of the design
process. Each of the major suppliers has its
own list of ‘satisfied customers’, working in
locations from Nevada to Papua New
Guinea, and from Australia to Appalachia.
It is, of course, sensible to remember that
all of these software packages rely on having
accurate data to work with, so it is essential
that users ensure that their input
information is not only clean, but is as accurate
as can be achieved. After all, the old
maxim ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ applies to
design software as much as it does to any
other data-reliant process.
In common with other sectors of mining and
exploration technology, there appears to have
been a steady trend toward consolidation within
software suppliers, usually with the aim of amalgamating
complementary products. Most suppliers
claim dominance in one particular aspect
or another, although it is clear that no one company
has an over-riding position in the wider
world market. Software development and computing
power have gone hand-in-hand here as
elsewhere in the industry, with 64-bit technology
becoming mainstream where large
amounts of data have to be handled.
Shareholders should always be able to
see where a project’s design has not met
the mark. Whether they can do anything
about it is, of course, another matter. Perhaps
the best thing about good design is
that it just keeps paying dividends.
64 | ASIA Miner | May/June 2013