What do enterprises produce? Gold, iron ore, coal, diamonds? No!
Every business makes money. This is the goal of every enterprise. If a ton of gold or iron ore mined does not bring you income, or, worse, your costs will be higher than the profit from the sale of products, what is the value of this ore for the enterprise?
Each ton of ore must bring the maximum income or bear the minimum cost in conditions of safe production and compliance with mining technology. Those. the distribution of the movement of the rock mass in time should lead the enterprise to the goal. In order to achieve the goal, it is necessary to create a good plan that will model the production process with the maximum achievement of volume and quality indicators. Each plan must be provided with correct, accurate and up-to-date data. Especially when it comes to short-term or operational planning.
What data does mine planning provide? This is surveying and geological information, design data and production and technical information (for example, from ERP systems).
All these processes carry a huge amount of graphical, digital and textual information, such as a cloud of laser scanning points, a mine surveying database, operational bottomhole survey, a geological block model, drilling and drilling well testing data, changes in contacts in the blasted rock mass, production indicators and their changes, changes in the dynamics of equipment operation, etc. The flow of data is constant and endless. And most of the information depends on each other. We must not forget that all this data is the primary source, the information from which the creation of the plan begins.
Therefore, to create an optimal plan, it is necessary to be able to obtain the most accurate data. The correctness of the initial information exponentially affects the final goal.
If one of the sources carries data with underestimated accuracy or incorrect information, then the entire chain of processes will be erroneous and moving away from the goal. Therefore, it is necessary to have resources that allow you to qualitatively prepare data and work with them.
If we talk about short-term planning, it is important that these data are not only accurate, but also up-to-date. It is necessary to be able to receive information at any time in order to respond to changes and quickly edit the production scenario. Accordingly, we need such systems and equipment that will improve the efficiency of processes for obtaining and processing information. Lidar scanners allow you to quickly obtain data with high accuracy, rock mass sampling technologies give a picture of the position of the ore body in the massif, positioning systems track the position and condition of equipment in real time, and the design and planning systems GEOVIA Surpac and are tools for creating projects and scenarios for the development of mining operations. To achieve the goal as quickly as possible, the systems must be linked into a single productive chain. Imagine: you receive data from different systems and sources, but they are available to you only upon request, moreover, this data is transferred to you by a specialist who can change the content at any time. This leads not only to a decrease in the speed of data acquisition, but also to a loss of accuracy or reliability at one of the stages of data transmission. Therefore, data must be centralized, stored on one platform, in one digital ecosystem and be available at any time. In addition, it is important to ensure the joint work of all departments, versioning, data integrity and security. The 3DEXPEREINCE platform copes with this task.
Information obtained from various sources - electronic systems, GGIS systems (GEOVIA Surpac), ERP systems, automated mine planning systems (), mining management systems (for example, VIST Group) - has a different data format.
This raises the question of system integration. Often, all decisions in the mining planning and design chain can be more or less integrated with each other.
But the intensity of the data flow, the number of their types, and the variability are such that a person is not able to convert from one system to another in a relatively fast time. Whether it's a geologist or a planning engineer, a specialist should not spend time importing and exporting files from one system to another, he should create value and move the enterprise towards a goal. Therefore, it is important to automate the integration process, set it up in such a way that the number of data processing manipulations is minimized.
Without automation, the process looks something like this. After surveying, the surveyor connects the scanner to a PC, extracts the survey file, converts the data to the appropriate format, opens the file in the GGIS system, creates a surface, performs the necessary manipulations to calculate volumes and generate reports, and saves a new version of the surface file on a network resource. To update the block model, it finds the updated survey file, loads it and the corresponding block model, applies the survey file as a new limiter, performs volume-quality calculations and reporting.
If there is operational data, for example, from dispatching systems, the geologist uploads data from such a system, imports coordinates into the MGIS, and generates a new limiter file. If there is up-to-date sampling data from the laboratory on the network resource, it sneaks to them through a string of folders and loads them, updates the block model, creates certificates, saves working files, converts the data into the format required for the dispatching system and loads them into this system. It is important not to forget about creating an archive copy of all files.
The automated process of processing and integrating data for surveying and geological support of mining operations using GEOVIA Surpac is as follows. The survey is ready, the surveyor connects the device to the PC, opens GEOVIA Surpac, launches the function of importing and processing survey data, selects from the list what should be obtained as a result.
The system generates graphical and tabular data, updates the working file on the network resource and saves the previous version of the file. The geologist launches the functions of updating the block model using the current mine surveying data and/or data from dispatching systems.
All data is loaded from a network resource / platform, the macro command converts and imports the necessary data, the geologist only needs to select the appropriate settings. After checking with the appropriate functions, the result is stored and exported to other systems.
Such a process has been implemented in the surveying and geological services at the Kachkanar GOK of the EVRAZ company.
EVRAZ KGOK is one of the five largest mining companies in Russia. The plant is located 140 km from EVRAZ NTMK, in the Sverdlovsk region. EVRAZ KGOK is developing the Gusevogorskoye deposit of titanomagnetite iron ores containing vanadium impurities. The vanadium content makes it possible to melt high-strength alloyed steel grades. The plant's production capacity is about 55 million tons of iron ore per year. The main consumer of EVRAZ KGOK products is EVRAZ NTMK.
Currently, EVRAZ KGOK mines ore from four open pits with its further processing in crushing, beneficiation, agglomeration and agglomeration shops. The final product (agglomerate and pellets) is loaded into railway wagons and sent to consumers, including abroad.
In 2018, EVRAZ KGOK produced more than 58,5 million tons of ore, produced 3,5 million tons of sinter, 6,5 million tons of pellets, and about 2,5 million tons of crushed stone.
Ore is mined in four quarries: the Main, Western, Northern, and also the Southern deposit. From the lower horizons, the ore is delivered by BelAZ vehicles, the rock mass is transported to the crushing plant by rail. Powerful 130-ton dump trucks, modern NP-1 locomotives, excavators with a bucket capacity of 12 cubic meters are used in the quarries.
The average iron content in the ore is 15,6%, the vanadium content is 0%.
The iron ore mining technology at EVRAZ KGOK is as follows: drilling - blasting - excavation - transportation to the processing site and overburden to dumps. ().
In 2019, the VIST Group automated dispatch system was introduced at Kachkanarsky GOK. The implementation of this solution allowed to increase the production control of the operation of mining and transport equipment, the movement of ore from the faces to the transshipment points, as well as to quickly obtain data on volumetric and qualitative indicators in the faces and at the transshipment points. Two-way integration of ASD VIST and GEOVIA Surpac systems was carried out, which made it possible to use the received data (position of equipment, degree of working out of the face, rock mass balance at transfer points, quality distribution at transfer points, etc.) for operational planning and design of mining operations, as well as to control the production process at the level of a line manager and an excavator driver.
Thanks to the developments of the leading geologist S.M. Nekrasov and chief mine surveyor A.V. Without money, specialists of the mine surveying and geological departments using GEOVA Surpac tools automated most of the processes for processing mine surveying data, designing, creating printed documentation, creating geological block models, updating geological and mine surveying information on a network resource. Now specialists do not need to perform repetitive processes on a daily basis, whether it is uploading / downloading images from / to the device, searching for the necessary data for daily work in a huge number of folders. GEOVIA Surpac macros do it for them. It is important to note that this data is available to all involved specialists from different departments. For example, to open the latest quarry survey, updated block model, blast block, utilities, etc., the planner does not have to look for it in a large number of mine surveying and geological files. All that is required for this is to open the corresponding menu in GEOVA Surpac and select the data to be loaded into the working window.
Automation tools made it easy to integrate GEOVIA Surpac and ASD VIST Group and make this process as simple and fast as possible.
By selecting the appropriate menu in the GEOVIA Surpac panel, the geologist receives from the ASD VIST operational data on block mining or data for a specific date and time. This data is used to analyze the current situation and update the block model.
After updating the block model and ore/overburden contacts in GEOVIA Surpac, the geologist uploads this information to the ASD VIST system with the click of a button, after which the data is available to all users in both systems.
By combining the capabilities of the mining equipment positioning toolkit in the ASD VIST Group system and the GEOVIA Surpac tools, the processes of controlling the movement of rock mass from the face to the transfer point, placing the rock mass in the sectors of the transfer points, controlling the balance of arrival / departure of rock mass by sectors and maintaining mobile residues were set up for the period of operational filling.
To do this, block models of transfer points were created in GEOVIA Surpac and a methodology for filling them in was developed. At the request of the geologist, the process of introducing rock mass into the block model (BM) to a virtual transshipment point, as well as shipment from it, can be carried out both in its entirety for the past period, and in the online mode. Having set the BM to be filled in with an indication of the end time, the macro program itself makes a request (after a certain time interval) to extract data on excavators that perform scooping, and also extracts information on the movement and unloading of vehicles at the transshipment point.
Thus, at the end of the macro program, current information is generated on the state of the warehouse, the presence of rock mass for a given period of time in a three-dimensional graphical form, and a summary table of the results of the operational change. This made it possible to quickly track the movement of ore, the balance and distribution of rock mass in the sectors of transfer points, as well as to present this information graphically in both systems and provide quick, free and secure access to information for all employees. In particular, according to the leading geologist S.N. Nekrasov, such a process made it possible to improve the accuracy of quality shipment planning from transshipment points to railway transport.
He also notes that if earlier it was only possible to assume what was brought to the transshipment points and represent only the average value of quality by sector, today the indicators are known for each individual section of the sector.
For a quick analysis of all sectors of transshipment points and the formation of a tabular report, a macro command was written in GEOVIA Surpac that displays and saves graphic information in the specified format. In this case, there is no need to open the block model of each sector, apply constraints, color the block model by attributes, or manually generate tabular reporting. All this is done with the push of a button.
You can learn more about the process and results of the integration carried out at the Kachkanar GOK from the post
Getting the necessary up-to-date data at any time, easy and quick access to up-to-date information, possession of tools that allow you to exchange and manage this data in various systems and interact with units opens the way to more and more opportunities to create a digital twin of your enterprise, which allows you to create more realistic scenarios of your mining plan and quickly respond to emerging changes in the course of production.
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Source: habr.com