ASX-listed mining advisory, mining software developer and professional development training specialist RungePincockMinarco (RPM) launched its Open Cut Coal XPAC Solution – a mine planning software product focused entirely on the intricacies of scheduling an opencut coal mine – late last month.
RPM mine planning product manager Alun Philips says the solution belongs to RPM’s range of commodity-specific solutions, based on the scheduling engine of the company’s flagship XPAC product, which focuses on a specific business-critical mine-planning function.
“This range introduces a simplified, user-friendly approach to mine planning, reducing the complexity of generating production schedules,” says Philips.
Open Cut Coal is RPM’s second commodity-specific solution, following the Underground Coal XPAC Solution, which launched earlier this year.
Underground Coal features a purpose-built mine design module, which includes powerful contouring, gridding and three-dimensional surface mapping abilities. These features work together to enable straightforward visualisation of the variations in gridded data.
The designs created using Underground Coal automatically generate the dependencies needed to create a mining schedule, define rules and determine a mining sequence.
Meanwhile, developed in conjunction with a large mining company, Open Cut Coal gives miners a standardised approach to scheduling – across their operations – while simplifying the process to generate robust and reliable schedules.
“Early adopters of the software program have already seen a significant reduction in implementation and user training time, owing to this approach,” notes Philips, adding that users have a small learning curve, as the interface guides one through the scheduling process, with in-depth assistance embedded into the application.
Further, Philips highlights that the biggest hurdles with other applications, in the past, has been the need to develop and maintain com-plex scripts to generate a workable schedule, but that, in RPM’s XPAC Solutions, the com-pany has removed the need for engineers to become script writers and debuggers, which enabled them to spend significantly more time planning their mine than managing their data.
“Users should not see the simplified inter-face as a reduction of the overall power in the RPM scheduling offering, because the Open Cut Coal is powered by the XPAC scheduling engine, which is capable of accelerating the generation of scheduling options,” says Philips.
“It is 40 years of built-in mining intelligence that enables users to generate accurate and robust schedules, which can easily forecast production with a modern, auditable and reliable software solution.”
Philips says the Open Cut Coal software can be implemented quickly, which enables quick start-up of operations without the time and expense associated with intensive software training or model building.