Another year has passed and here at GEOVIA, we continue to stay on top of mining trends so we can deliver updated content to our readers. According to the 2018 Deloitte Tracking the Trends report, digital technology is still a top focus for the mining industry and smart businesses use data-driven insights to drive value, particularly the use of “thorough, rational analysis grounded in data to develop new ideas, investments and innovations”.
We’d like to think that the top 5 GEOVIA blog posts of 2017 also echo these trends, particularly some of the innovative new features in our recent product releases.
Read our roundup below!
1. GEOVIA Surpac 6.8.1 Released
When we released Surpac 6.8.1 in November 2017, we announced new stability and point cloud improvements to enable the inclusion of new technologies that lower the cost of processes such as drone data for surveying. This version of Surpac supports editing point cloud data and selective meshing, as well as solids slicing enhancements as an alternative to manual workflows.
2. Pseudoflow in GEOVIA Whittle
The Pseudoflow algorithm in the new version of Whittle enables strategic mine planners to generate pit shells in a fraction of the time compared to the original Lerchs-Grossmann algorithm. The LG algorithm remains an industry standard but significant academic effort has been spent on finding more efficient pit optimization algorithms.
Learn more abut Pseudoflow & Whittle
3. Creating Contours from a DTM Surface for Plotting in Surpac
This post performed particularly well as it’s a commonly asked question and useful for geologists who want to generate a plot in plan view. Check out our step by step tutorial on how to use the surface and string editing functions in GEOVIA Surpac to extract contours from a topography file for plotting.
4. Simultaneous Optimization Explained in GEOVIA Whittle
It was a Whittle year in 2017 with many of our GEOVIA users searching for information on strategic mine planning. This post explains what Simultaneous Optimization or SIMO is, as well as presents an eBook that describes the technical foundation of the SIMO module. The eBook talks about:
- Block parcel aggregation;
- The formulation of the mine planning problem into solvable linear systems;
- An iterative methodology to optimise the mining plan and stockpile grades; and
- The benefit of simultaneous optimization over sequential and traditional optimization methods
5. How to download GEOVIA applications on 3ds.com/support
Last but not least, a how-to blog post on how to download GEOVIA applications from our support website. We understand it can be challenging at times to find the right link you need for software downloads and to log support requests. We hope this guide on how to access these services has been useful. We also published a newer blog post in December recapping the different features of the 3DS support site, including:
- How to Download Releases
- Knowledge Base
- Submit a support request
- GEOVIA Discussion Board
