Grade Control Optimizer with 3D Blast Movement Modeling & Sequencing

GeoMine OreController (OreController), is an Open-Pit grade controller and optimizer developed to create, sequence and schedule fine-grained truck-by-truck dig-units (TBT units) based on 3D blast movement modeling that aims to minimize dilution and ore loss for open-pit mining.

Traditional grade control practice usually entails determining the dig limits for the cuts of an open-pit bench against an in-situ block model. This fails to model the reality: after a blast is fired, blocks on the bench will break, throw and mix with their neighboring blocks, invalidating the predefined dig limits for all, but trivial, cases.  The dilution and ore losses have also been hard to quantify and are usually a guesstimate by experience or determined after the fact.

A better approach emerging in recent years has been to take into account the impact of the 3D movements of the rock being blasted. OreController is designed specifically for this purpose. With OreController, the user only needs to specify an in-situ block model and a pair of topographical bench surfaces, and optionally a pair of polypipe position files before and after the blast. A post-blast model will be generated automatically and it can be used to create fine-grained shovel-truck dig units which can then be scheduled by iScheduler-OP against the blast model.

The newly released OreController v2.0 offers optimization options which were not present in the previous version. It uses an objective-focused approach to iterate upon and improve the mapping from the pre to post blast states. It also supports incorporation of actual measured displacements of material (ex., pre and post blast polypipe positions) into the objective function if such information is available. The new optimization options allow OreController to further reduce dilution and ore loss, and to maximize ore recovery.

OreController Key Benefits

OreController Feature List

Generates 3D blast models from an in-situ block model, a pair of topographical bench surfaces and an optional pair of polypipe position files before and after blast

The introduction of the objective-based optimization options in Version 2 allows OreController to iterate upon and improve the material mapping from the pre to post blast. The  support for pre and post blast polypipe position files also allows OreController v2.0 to incorporate actual measured displacements of material into the objective function. 

Automatically generates and sequences thousands of fine-grained TBT units from the blast model. These TBT units closely follow the ore and waste delineation of the generated 3D blast model.

Option to interactively edit sequences of TBT units;

Output the statistics of the modeled dilution and ore losses.

Creates TBT activities against the blast model for scheduling with iScheduler-OP (requires an iScheduler-OP license)

System Requirements: