Design Enhancement
HIghlights
Improving a mine plan isn’t only about chasing higher NPV, it’s also about making designs more practical. This workflow helps engineers refine scenarios that respect constraints while preserving profitability.
- Reveals alternatives with similar NPV but fewer violations, aiding feasibility.
- Highlights block sequences that improve geometric compliance.
- Speeds up iteration by reusing prior results as a starting point.
Design Enhancement is the process of creating scenarios to conduct extensive searches for solutions with similar NPV values but with fewer violations and improved shapes. This process allows finding more efficient and sustainable solutions that meet specific mine constraints and needs. Hence, seeking these kinds of scenarios is important for optimizing mining operations and for reducing risks and costs.
In Design Enhancement, scenarios are created with more rigorous geometric constraints without compromising the desirable requirements. The goal is to reduce violations and find better forms for the project. This is possible due to the global nature of optimization and the non-linearity of the problem, enabling the use of stricter requirements for the geometric constraints that could lead to a better performance of the project.
Example
Required dataset
Preinstalled Marvin deposit. It can also be downloaded here.
Consider the initial scenario and respective decision tree built for a Design Enhancement process. The goal is to evaluate stricter variations in the geometric constraints (in green).
Note the variation of results for Cumulative NPV and production. The base scenario has a small violation on dump production for period 1. However, when modifying the minimum width to 120m (scenario DE_BW100_MW120_VR150) this violation is not present anymore. Hence, this is an example of how small variations in geometric constraints could lead to less violations.
