Advisor

MineOpTek Advisor

Advisor is MineOpTek’s state of the art MIP-based strategic schedule optimizer, incorporating simultaneous optimization of:

Mine scheduling, supporting hundreds of mines and ore sources optimized simultaneously
Route scheduling
Fleet optimization
Blending constraints and limitations at any point in the material handling network
Dump sequencing
Stockpile optimization
Full detailed user-defined economic model including capital and operating costs.

Advisor allows selection of any criteria for optimization, e.g. maximize cashflow, or minimize fleet size, or maximize metal/copper production, or any combination, and any point in the model can be flagged as an optimization target.

Advisor is also the only scheduling product built from the ground up for serious enterprise use with inbuilt data management, change logging and auditing, and an expectation of multi-user-facilitated configuration and data sharing.

MIP - Enterprise-Grade Scheduling

Mine scheduling is traditionally a guided search exercise, whether it’s an experienced mining engineer using Excel, a more recent Gantt-chart based approach with enhanced schedulers, or the current state of the art search-based scheduling tools that automatically generate hundreds of thousands of schedules, cull the schedules that violate constraints, and sort by value or some other user-guided criteria. The downside of this approach is that the solution space could be in the order of millions or hundreds of millions of potential schedules (most of which violate constraints), so a search based approach may only investigate a fraction of the possibilities. These tools can claim to have generated many hundreds of thousands of schedules, but unless they can tell you the total that could have been generated, and the fraction that they did, there is no way to be sure the schedules produced are truly the best for the mine, or even close.

For this reason MIP based scheduling is the pure-mathematics based approach that is the global standard in every other industry, whether it’s airlines determining the best cashflow for the least number of aircraft and the highest passenger turnover, or large global equipment manufacturers minimizing warehousing while ensuring parts are always available where needed. And the mining giants have already replaced search-based methodologies with MIP where it has been available.

MIP (Mixed Integer Programming) is a mathematical approach that converts the scheduling problem into a set of mathematical formulae which can then be ‘solved’. Constraint violation sections of the solution space are quickly identified and dropped by the solver engine while it rapidly moves towards the provably (thanks to the maths) highest-value schedules. As it does so it generates increasingly higher-value schedules and each time reports the exact distance from optimal, so stopping a solve with a ‘1%’ distance means the current schedule is only off the provably maximum value schedule by 1%. So for example, if the current best schedule gives a $1 billion cashflow with a 1% distance, it is certain that letting the solver continue will only increase the cashflow by an extra $10 million at most.

Multi-Mine Scheduling

Advisor is able to schedule more than one mine, and will allocate capacity and resources where needed according to schedule objectives and blending requirements. Each mine can also be associated with different block models for different metal and product types using shared capacity and infrastructure.

Within each mine the scheduling units can be resource blocks straight from the block model, larger blast shapes or seams appropriate for the stage design, or whole benches or bench groups, depending on the level of detail required.