Operational Planning
Your Situation
You have developed a long-term schedule. You want to take a component of your long-term schedule and add more detail reflecting issues such as equipment availability. The mining blocks from your long-term schedule now become "exploded" into drill and blast, load and haul, and backfill operations for open pit mining. For underground the explosion is to development, drilling, and stoping. You may also have complex blending requirements based on grades and/or ore-types and may wish to maintain a constant grade feed into your plant. Your short-term schedule is to be a schedule "within" your long-term schedule. Some people call this hierarchical scheduling. You also want to close the loop between the model that you schedule from and what actually gets mined.
Our Simple Solutions
With Minemax Short Term Scheduling technologies, you start with the component of your long-term schedule that you wish to schedule on a shorter-term basis. As with long-term, you enter all the constraints associated with development, mining, material handling and processing. However, with short-term you now start bringing capacity constraints associated with individual pieces of equipment to bear. The guiding long-term schedule has been generated based on optimizing NPV. You now focus on optimizing on alignment between the two levels of scheduling to maximize schedule alignment and minimize value erosion in the strategic plan.
Minemax offers two solution options for operational planning:
- Minemax iGantt is the original solution for operational planning which provides an easy-to use Gantt chart / 3D visualization approach to scheduling.
- Minemax Tempo is the new innovative solution for Integrated and Optimized Mine Planning. It translates long-term plans into practical and optimal short-term plans, automatically calculates a plan’s compliance with a longer-term plan, and helps to close the loop between actual production and the short-term plan.
Comparison between Tempo and iGantt
| Capabilities | Tempo | iGantt |
|---|---|---|
| Manual short-term scheduling and resource allocation |  |
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| Specialized underground resource auto-scheduling | Planned for 2010 | |
| 3D Visualization and animation of schedule results | |
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| 3D Drag and drop scheduling | |
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| Collaborative, multi-user environment within and across mine sites | |
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| Mine plan compliance measurement | |