Integrated stratigraphic planning

Functionality released in Maptek Vulcan recently allows engineers and geologists to change batter angles and berm widths, insert and ramps, and make highwalls, pits and dumps on the fly.

Users can therefore very quickly build a pit in the right place, and in the right way, using a familiar Vulcan experience as they are guided through an easy-to-follow workflow for open pit mine planning.

Miners of coal deposits and any operations working to horizons will benefit from the real-time, interactive approach, with pits updating dynamically as parameters change in the setup panel.

Existing modelling can be incorporated directly into the design as grids or triangulations, in addition to bench levels, and Maptek has automated the ability to start the base of the pit on a preferred horizon floor.

The new option is eminently suitable for dynamic dump design and handles open strings representing strip or block-based highwall profiles.

The ability to insert ramps into the design and interactively control the start, end and switchback locations greatly enhances the optimal positioning of access routes to the designed pit.

Once a preferred design has been created, a snapshot of the design at that point in time can be saved as a layer or triangulation for later use.

Interactive pit and highwall creation

The jewel in the crown is the interactive Create Pit/Highwall option which takes the direct output of the geological modelling and makes it available for pit or highwall creation.

Entire pit shells or individual highwalls can be made based on seed strings or polygons.

This then directly feeds into the Pit Topography and Pit Splitter functionality, resulting in fully attributed solids based on Pit/Strip/Block/Bench/Horizon ready for reserve reporting, direct use in Maptek scheduling products or tailored export to third-party schedulers.

The development roadmap for integrated stratigraphic planning includes HARP models with stored attributes such as batter angles and berm widths, enabling geotechnical analysis.