Part 2: Factoring Drill & Blast Into Your Short-Term Schedule in GEOVIA Minex

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In Part 1, we talked about how Minex can be used in short-term scheduling to help mine planners effectively utilize mining equipment, consider dilution losses, factor in drilling and blasting time and more. In particular, we discussed the usage of Premining and Surface Mining rules to help you better visualize how your equipment will mine in the field.

Now that you have determined the Pre-Mining and/or Surface Mining rates, you can factor drill and blast into your short-term schedule to make it more practical. Note that it is good practice to save all data before turning on this rule. It is however not necessary to do Pre-Mining and Surface Mining for Drill and Blast Scheduling.

1.    Tick the “Perform Drill, Charge & Blast” checkbox in the schedule rules window (see below).


2.    Select  the two variables, named DRILRATE and CHRGRATE as drill rate variable and charge rate variable respectively. These variables have to be pre-defined in the reserves database with the default values of “1 You can change these values for certain layers based on your own requirements. Choose your appropriate calendar number for Drilling and Charging.

3.    Optional: You can use an SQL to update a production factor variable and use the variable in the equipment. The production factors used above for drilling and charging (DRILRATE and CHRGRATE) may be dependent on several other variables such as material type, thickness, volume or any other quality variable.

4.    Change the Pre-Mining code of the layers in the reserves database where you want drilling and blasting to take place to DRBL. You can use the Paste Layers function as below for the purpose.

5. Next, you will need to set the equipment allowable codes to DRBL as shown below for the drill, the charging equipment and the blasting equipment only.

6. Once the above setup has been completed, you may run your schedule as per normal Minex scheduling operations.

7. Reporting will also follow the normal Minex schedule reporting steps. However, it is recommended that you choose to create a full report with no summaries; you may also report the details of your layers, the start date/time and equipment. A sample output report is shown below.

For any other enquiries about short-term scheduling or reporting formats, please contact us at GEOVIA.Services@3ds.com. We can help customize your reports using a macro. Check out our Part 1, Using the Calendar File in Short-Term Scheduling in GEOVIA Minex.

 

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Ranajit Das

Ranajit Das

Senior Mining Industry Process Consultant, GEOVIA at Dassault Systèmes
Ranajit is a qualified Mining Engineer with over 22 years of experience in mine planning, consulting, operations, logistics, exploration and feasibility studies. Ranajit has previously worked for the Steel Authority of India, Santa Fe Mining in Chile and JSW Steel in India. He specializes in GEOVIA Minex and Surpac.