Software developer RPMGlobal has announced the release of the next generation Automated Pit Design (APD) solution, which it said represents a significant leap forward in open pit mine design.
The new release was developed in close collaboration with key customers, industry consultants, and RPMGlobal’s own consulting and advisory team, the company said. It also extends the existing range of automated design tools for underground coal, underground metals, and open cut coal.
Similar automated design capabilities are now available to open pit miners, streamlining the entire pit design process and allowing users to create optimal designs with far greater speed and accuracy.
“Our customers have repeatedly told us traditional pit design tools are slow, tedious, and require extensive re-work when changes are made. APD directly addresses these concerns, making it far faster to create designs and maintain them over time,” said CCO Michael Baldwin.
“By coupling the design, reserving, and scheduling processes into a single suite, users can quickly evaluate multiple pit design options, and the various schedules that each design alternative affords. This facilitates the discovery of the very best combination of mine design and life of mine schedule, delivering value that would have been overlooked in the past.”
New pit designs are now easily created from optimized pit shells and user-defined inputs. They become more than shapes on a screen, rather an intelligent and live mathematical model. APD uses a highly sophisticated geotechnical model that can be populated directly from the block model. The in-built intelligence allows users to easily adjust the location of pit walls by simply dragging toe or crest lines.
APD automatically responds by projecting the pit walls upwards, downwards, or in both directions as required. Batter angles and berm widths automatically adjust to honor the geotechnical requirements for that location. Users can also define rules that govern how slope angles can change, ensuring smooth, practical transitions between different geotechnical domains.
In APD, ramps are not additions to the pit design – they are an integral part of it. Users can create complex ramp networks that contain any number of switchbacks and intersections. Users have full control over the key properties of every section and ramps can be moved by simply dragging them to the desired location. Because the ramp network is maintained dynamically, APD will automatically update the overall pit design whenever the user moves a section of the ramp network.
All designs, whether created using APD or imported from other tools, are automatically cut with the topography, split into benches and blocks, and reserved against the block model, ready for scheduling.
APD is part of the MinePlanner suite, so it integrates natively with RPMGlobal’s existing mine planning solutions, allowing design and scheduling to work seamlessly.