6. Validation stage

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Complex projects with many constraints may demand hours to execute. Hence, it is important that imported data is validated before to avoid possible errors. This page provides an example with the Marvin Deposit and shows how you can set up and run a scenario to validate your data.

Set up

In order to validate your data and make sure there are no apparent errors in it, the following setup is recommended:

Process and dumps set with respective recovery values.
A bigger production capacity than the expected reserves. In this example, the expected life of mine vs production rate is 35-year producing 10 Mt per year. Hence, a value of 1,000 Mt would be big enough to cover the whole reserve.
No discount rate.
No stockpiling.
Density and slope values.
Timeframe: Years (1), since it would all be processed in 1 period.

You can create a new scenario by right clicking in a decision tree. If you don’t have any decision trees, you can create one by clicking on the + sign.

After creating a scenario, you will be prompted to enter general parameters, such as density and slope angles.

The Destinations tab should be enabled after entering the general parameters.

Here, you need to add at least one process and one waste dump.

Next, you will be required to add the Production limits.

For the Validation scenario, you can use years in the Timeframe and an unbounded value for the process, for example 1,000,000,000.

The Overview tab will give you a general view of your setup. For the Marvin dataset, the validation will be as depicted below.

Lastly, you can run the scenario by using the Run button at the top.

Results

Once the execution has finished, you will be able to visualize the reports in the same tab, or open the respective csv and xlsx files in Excel. This execution will also generate the topography surface that you can as an example to create other surfaces, for instance force or restrict mining areas. After running the suggested scenario, you should evaluate the results in the Viewer tab and the respective reports in Excel.

Evaluation

Evaluating the results reported in the validation should help you identify any apparent problems that you can fix before running more complex scenarios. Some of the common questions that might help you in this analysis:

Did the scenario run properly?
Are most of the positive economic values from the process inside this surface?
Is the mining happening in reasonable areas?
Is the NPV reported reasonable for an unrestricted scenario?

If your validation does not seem correct, you might have to reevaluate your block model. For example, there might be wrong values in the data imported, errors with data formatting, or if you used the internal calculator, there might be something wrong with the formulas applied. Otherwise, if everything seems correct, you should proceed to the next page.

MiningMath

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6. Validation stage

Set up

Results

Evaluation

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