MIRARCO's software on the way bringing visual tools to the mine.

• Author: Stewart, Nick
• Position: MINING

The first major commercial software to emerge from Sudbury's Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation (MI-RARCO) is soon set to make a splash among mine planners across the globe.

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Having wrapped up a distribution deal with Australia-based GijimaAst earlier this year, MIRARCO will see its Schedule Optimization Tool (SOT) commercially available by the end of 2008.

"There are few software tools in mining that use the benefits of new technologies," says Andrew Dasys, vice-president of Mirarco.

"This is a good example in that it can run through a huge number of possible scenarios in very little time."

Having spent three years in development under the Engineering Exploration Visualization and Optimization (E2VO) umbrella, the software does much of the grinding guesswork and calculation involved in manually developing mine scheduling options.

The program uses a system known as genetic algorithms to assemble its schedules, searching for various elements between data sets.

This offers a range of advantages, bringing the length of the process from weeks and sometimes months to a fraction of the time. Research associate Bryan Maybee says that with 1,500 activities, the rough equivalent of a short-term mine life, one schedule can be generated every 20 seconds.

As such, SOT can represent different things to different people, he says.

Its usefulness can also be brought down to the direct mine level to better determine the proper scheduling of equipment and personnel.

It can also be used on an a broader operations level to help identify and narrow the level of risk inherent in a project to make it more attractive to investors. For instance, rather than having a potentially high-value project with 100 per cent uncertainty, the tool can help identify a slightly lower-value project but one that also reduces the uncertainty to 10 per cent.

The tool also represents a major advantage on the personnel side, particularly at a time where a premium is placed upon the proper use of skilled staff, Dasys says.

Rather than spending their time hashing out optimal scheduling opportunities, mine planning personnel can instead spend their time doing more in-depth work.

"If you've got someone with 10 years of experience, you don't want them working through the minutia," he says. "You want them handling higher-level thinking."

This level of industry interest and need first sparked the creation of the software and helped to...