New Vulcan Development – Beyond Vulcan 8

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

News is to hand from the global Vulcan product team on developments gathering pace for the next Vulcan release.
Block Caving
A new module will encapsulate new functionality being designed specifically for long term planning of underground projects which are mined by the Block Caving method.
This module, which is undergoing industry testing before release, allows users to quickly simulate the dilution of material and its economic assessment, and calculate high economic extraction, sequencing, and long-term planning.

Integrated with visual and statistics tools, Block Caving is based on Vulcan’s powerful block modelling. All calculations and data manipulations are set up in a smart and flexible interface which simplifies the problem setup, saving time and allowing users to explore more alternatives quicker.

Chronos
Multiple enhancements are underway for Maptek’s scheduling module, Chronos.

Advanced Optimisation options will provide users with an interface to most of the advanced optimisation settings available in CPLEX. Every setting accessible through the command line solver will be available in the Chronos Problem Setup panel.
The same level of information on the optimisation progress will also be available through the Vulcan graphical console. This allows the optimisation process to be executed in the background, and interrupted through the Chronos menu, giving the graphical interface almost the same level of control as the command line interface.

Parallel Optimisation will allow users to take full advantage of multi core CPUs to run and solve optimisation problems, with significantly higher levels of performance. Given that the complexity of the process requires high amounts of CPU time, Parallel Optimisation has been upgraded to CPLEX 12.1, enabling a multi-threaded optimisation process as standard.

Short Term Scheduling will allow users to quickly generate short term plans for one or several open pit mines simultaneously. The user interface is fully configurable, allowing users to handle the objectives for the mine and the plant, using and managing multiple stockpiles automatically. This new tool will generate:

• Charts and interactive Excel or CSV reports of movements in the mine and plant, and
• High precision triangulations with resulting cuts per period, which can be fed into advanced calculations in block models.

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