Pseudoflow on its way in GEOVIA Whittle

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After years of capital expenditure cuts and spending deferrals, many of our customers are ready to invest in technologies that will give them a competitive advantage when this long downturn is finally over. In short, they want to approach their upcoming mining projects strategically and evaluate the financial viability and the optimal mine strategy for a particular deposit.

This leads to many conversations about GEOVIA Whittle™ and to my surprise, about the Pseudoflow algorithm. I’d like to take a few minutes to discuss how we at GEOVIA are approaching Pseudoflow and what you should expect from it.

Whittle Three-D, released in 1984, contained the first industrial packaged version of the Lerchs-Grossmann (LG) algorithm. This became the industry standard for pit optimization, to such an extent that it is part of any university syllabus to this day. Over the following decades, significant academic effort has been spent on finding more efficient pit optimization algorithms.

In 2008, Hochbaum published a paper on Pseudoflow which was demonstrated to be more efficient than LG and other prevalent algorithms in this space.

The Pseudoflow algorithm will be included in the next release of GEOVIA Whittle. When compared to the original LG algorithm, Strategic Mine Planners will be able to generate Pit Shells in a fraction of the time. We are able to generate the same pit shells as LG using Pseudoflow, but in mere seconds to minutes, compared to the previous amount of time it would take, being hours to tens of hours.

With these sorts of improvements, we expect the behavior of Strategic Mine Planners using Whittle to change. What once was a case of hitting the Run button and grabbing coffee, lunch or heading home for the night, will now be a case of reviewing the results within a few minutes. That’s right – minutes.

For those that push the upper limit and need to have that coffee break, we have found Pseudoflow returning results in 5 minutes compared to 15.5 hours for block models containing 21 million blocks.

Dassault Systèmes will be releasing Whittle with the new Pseudoflow algorithm as part of the core product to all maintained customers. This means all of our Whittle users will be able to take advantage of these significant improvements.

Stay tuned for more detailed information about Pseudoflow and Whittle as we will release shortly an in-depth white paper on the topic.

You may also be interested in 5 Minutes with Whittle Consulting or more information on Advanced Simultaneous Optimization.

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Shawn Ready

Shawn Ready

Senior Portfolio Manager, GEOVIA at Dassault Systèmes
Shawn has over 20 years’ experience in both the mining industry and software development. He has worked in various roles over the years, ranging from Principal Consultant in Mining Engineering, Software Developer, Development Manager and most recently as a Portfolio Manager for GEOVIA. Shawn's focus is on the Design and Engineering space within GEOVIA’s products. Shawn is based in Wollongong, Australia and as such, likes to spend his spare time down at the beach surfing.
Shawn Ready

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