Mining software and simulation company CAE Mining has sold the latest version of CAE Studio 5D Planner to China Gold. CAE Studio 5D Planner, CAE Mining’s technical software solution for mine planning, will be used at the China Gold-owned Jiama copper/polymetallic mine, in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China.

The Jiama project is one of the largest copper/gold polymetallic mines in China. The mine has the potential to increase production through the expansion of current openpit operations and the development of new openpit and underground mining operations.

Recognising the need for detailed, practical and integrated long-, medium- and short-term mine designs and schedules for the underground operation, China Gold turned to CAE Mining for its world-leading solution, CAE Studio 5D Planner.

The most recent version of CAE Studio 5D Planner is MR22, which was released in February. It contains significant improve-ments on previous versions in terms of performance, maintenance fixes and powerful new features.

CAE Studio 5D Planner automates many of the manual and time-consuming tasks in mine design and scheduling and integrates all levels of planning into a single data set, with the integrity of visual audit through animations. The software solution is scalable for future needs, and has additional modules, such as genetic algorithm schedule optimisation, blending, drilling and blasting, ventilation modelling, financial modelling and budgeting.

We welcome China Gold to our growing software user base in China and look forward to supporting the company’s planning process as the important Jiama project is developed,” states CAE Mining president Damian McKay.

CAE Studio 5D Planner is also widely used in South Africa by mining operations and consultants. CAE Mining has a substantial presence in Johannesburg and offers product support, training and consulting services, as well as sales, from its office there.

CAE Studio 5D Planner provides detailed mine planning for openpit and underground mining and is the complete automated mine-design, planning and scheduling system. It fully integrates mine design and Gantt chart scheduling, which enable the user to rapidly change a design according to updated geological information and immediately see the updated schedule.

Based on the CAE Studio geological resource modelling engine, CAE Studio 5D Planner for openpit operations accurately takes the shape of the openpit and pushback mines from a strategic plan, enabling engi-neers to create pit designs and more detailed mining blocks within pushbacks and benches.

These mining blocks, which can represent anything from entire benches to individual blasts, can then be scheduled using the inte-grated Gantt chart scheduler. Automated Boolean preparation routines enable the engineer to rapidly generate realistic levels of detail in three dimensions, resulting in accurate, robust and realistic schedules in a short timeframe.

CAE Studio 5D Planner is useful for virtu-ally any mined commodity. In addition to its extensive use in underground hard-rock mines, it has also been used in underground coal mining and potash and other soft-rock applications.

CAE Studio 5D Planner for underground mining can virtually model any type of mining method, from sublevel stoping and block caving to room-and-pillar and South African reef mining, across a wide variety of commodities such as gold, copper, nickel, zinc, diamonds and coal, among others.

CAE Studio 5D Planner for openpit mining can be used to model any sort of openpit mining of any commodity.

“CAE Mining launched CAE Studio 5D Planner in January 2012 as the successor to the popular Mine2-4D solution, continuing its long-running legacy of integrated mine design and scheduling. While maintaining its popular process-orientated approach, CAE Mining has made vast improvements in usability, processing and data management. These improvements include new under-ground design types and an openpit module,” he concludes.