Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Annual them. The activities are placed in the schedule according to time intervals that represent
the planning periods, and they are allocated to the material resources they consume.
Additionally, the mining activities are optionally allocated to the loading equipment and
Seminar haulage fleet that were associated with the material cut in MineSight® IP. Alternatively, the
mine planner can assign the activities to mining equipment of his choosing. In this way, the
mine planner has created a basic schedule that includes the major productions tasks at a
macro level scale.
The mine planner can then use MineSight® AP to subdivide each long duration mining
activity into a series of shorter duration activities so that he can intersperse auxiliary
support and maintenance activities. For instance, an activity representing the preventative
maintenance of a shovel can be inserted into the schedule between successive mining
activities. In this way, the mine planner can develop an activity based plan at whatever
level of detail he requires.
Normal Course of Action
1. The planner creates mine material cuts in MineSight® IP for a given planning period
and saves them to a database.
2. The planner opens MineSight® AP and imports the material cut data from the
database.
3. MineSight® AP converts the mining cuts to a material resources and corresponding
mining activities.
4. MineSight® AP inserts the material resources into the resource column of the schedule.
5. MineSight® AP inserts the mining activities into the schedule at the correct time
intervals assigned to the correct material and equipment resources.
6. The planner subdivides each long duration mining activity into a sequence of shorter
duration activities.
7. For each shovel, the mine planner inserts preventative maintenance activities into the
schedule among the mining activities.
8. The mine planner creates and inserts auxiliary support activities into the schedule.
9. The mine planner allocates equipment resources for the auxiliary support activities
10. The mine planner saves and presents the schedule.
Alternative Course of Action
1. MineSight® AP inserts the mining activities into the schedule at the correct time
intervals assigned to the correct material resources. (Branch from Step 5)
2. The planner assigns the mining activities to both shovels and haulage fleets.
3. The planner subdivides each long duration mining activity into a sequence of shorter
duration activities.
4. For each shovel, the mine planner inserts preventative maintenance activities into the
schedule among the mining activities.
5. The mine planner creates and inserts auxiliary support activities into the schedule.
6. The mine planner allocates equipment resources for the auxiliary support activities.
7. The mine planner saves and presents the schedule.
Building a Plan From Production Drilling Patterns
The mine planner builds an activity based short-range mine plan by first using the
MineSight® IP to generate production drilling patterns for a planning period of interest.
From these drill patterns, MineSight® AP resources, activities, and assignments are
derived. Patterns become one or more bench resources and drilling and blasting activities
that consume them. The activities are placed in the schedule according to time interval
that represents the planning period, and they are allocated to the benches they consume.
Additionally, the drilling activities are optionally allocated to the drilling equipment
that was associated with each pattern. Alternatively, the mine planner can assign the
Seminar based on geometry and economics—high-grade material near the surface is mined first.
Equipment resource levels required for the planned excavations are determined and if
additional equipment is required, it can be purchased.
The reverse is true for short-range mine planning, it tends to be biased towards resource
constraints and less by precedence relationships. For shorter time periods when work
activities are about to be executed, precedence relationships aren’t as clearly discernable
while resource availability constraints are of immediate concern. Work activities that could
be executed simultaneously based on precedence relationships may compete for limited
resources and must be scheduled sequentially. In the short term, order is less important
as task precedence relationships may be non-existent, unknown, or soft. For some
mining activities, task boundaries can be blurred as one task runs into another. Resource
availability constraints however are firm and very tangible.
MineSight® AP can model complex activities that rely on a coordination of several
resources simultaneously thus simplifying work scheduling for mine planners. A mine
planner can incorporate several work functions within a task such as loading and hauling.
He must then assign the task to a shovel and fleet of trucks for a given time interval. By
explicitly allocating resources to the task, the mine planner can avoid resource conflicts
because each resource can only be assigned to one task at a time. Complex activities, when
combined with multiple dimensions of resource constraints, promote realism in planning
as resources have to be properly allocated.
To be effective, schedules and mine plans must keep up with the changing situations
and requirements that occur in mines as work progresses. MineSight® AP is designed
to facilitate dynamically evolving schedules that the mine planner can keep updated
by adding, removing, and resigning activities to resources and/or time intervals. Not
all activities are known before hand so they can be added as they are discovered. Some
activities have to be cancelled before any work has been done and some activities must be
reassigned to other resources or time periods.
The mine planner can also indicate when activities have been successfully completed
or interrupted once work has begun due to some exceptional circumstance. In either case,
the activity with actual starting time, duration, and resource assignment are permanently
recorded in the schedule. The schedule as such serves as a historical document of actual
mining work and can be used for comparison with earlier archived versions of the schedule.
MineSight® AP facilitates the creation of early start resource constrained feasible activity
based work schedules. Limited resource project schedules can be optimized either in
terms of resource leveling or allocation using a variety of strategies. Resource leveling
involves reducing peak requirements by shifting slack activities to non-peak periods
without extending the overall project by pushing work into future. Resource allocation
involve assigning tasks to a fixed amount of resources according to scheduling heuristics
that determine which lower priority tasks are postponed if total requirements for a given
period exceed resources.
Although the initial version of MineSight® AP will not provide automatic optimization,
it will facilitate the easy manipulation of schedules so that mine planners can quickly
manually optimize schedules with a reasonable amount of effort. Traditionally, people
optimize activity based plans by identifying the critical path of tasks and then attempt to
shorten it. Although limited resource scheduling does not have true critical paths due to
the resource constraints, under certain circumstances critical sequences of tasks can occur
which are identifiable with MineSight® AP. Mine planners can then examine the critical
sequence of tasks to determine if reassigning lower priority tasks can shorten it.
Activity scheduling optimization is usually attempted using a number of different
heuristics depending on the nature of the work or the industry in which it is employed.
Typically activities are prioritized giving higher priority to slackless tasks that have
Seminar In practice, activity based project and process schedules serve very important functions
and have demonstrated their worth to managers and planners in a variety of applications.
Activity based planning can be used to simulate longer-range operations under assumed
conditions. Planners can project work activities into the future to examine the effects on
production targets, resource requirements, and potential conflicts. Planners can determine
the effects planned or unanticipated changes have on operations so that they can take
appropriate action if required. When schedules are projected into the future, conflicts
and bottlenecks with regards to resources can be discovered and addressed by altering
plans to address shortages. Planners can try various operational scenarios and resource
usage patterns and compare the resulting plans. Activity based scheduling can be used in
generating day-to-day schedules for guiding the operations of a firm. Planners can allocate
resources to different work activities to optimize productivity and resource utilization.
Activity schedules serve as the basis for planning external tasks such as preventative
maintenance, auxiliary support and service work, and material procurement. Activity
based plans and schedules serve as the starting point of communications and coordination
between planners and operators, and external suppliers. Activity based planning, when
used by mangers and planners who understand it strengths and limitations, can prove
to be a valuable planning and scheduling method that has the potential to improve the
quality of short-range mine planning as well.
Increases Planning Detail
Activity based mine planning improves short-range mine planning by increasing the
level of planning detail. Work is decomposed into discrete sequential activities that are
considered, explicitly stated, and then scheduled into context with allocated resources.
Detailed mining operations that are explicitly stated as tasks can be managed in the overall
scope of the mining project. Additionally, mine planners and supervisors can use them to
ensure that adequate or sufficient work is being done, unnecessary work is not done, and
the work that is done delivers the stated mining objective.
Increases Planning Realism
Activity based mine planning increases mine plan realism. Work tasks that mine
planners organize by predecessor-successor precedence and constrained by resource
availability dependencies coerce plans to be operationally feasible. Precedence
relationships cause work tasks to be sequenced in a technological or logical mining order—
material has to be drilled and shot before it can be mined. Resource availability constraints
force mine planners to consider resource availability, allocation, and conflicts—two work
activities can’t use the same equipment at the same time. Precedence relationships and
resource constraints combined enable mine planners to develop practical feasible plans
that can be achieved by mine operations.
Plan Optimization
Activity based mine planning improves plan quality as mine planners can optimize
mining schedules. Mine planners can compare schedules of various mining scenarios
projected into the future to determine which schedule achieves higher productivity and
resource utilization. Although resource constrained activity schedules do not have critical
paths in the traditional sense, mine planners can identify one or more critical sequences
of tasks that span the length of a schedule and that when shortened moves work activity
forward in time. A critical sequence of activities is represented by a series of slackless tasks
that are usually the result of a resource bottleneck—several tasks sequentially allocated to
the same piece of equipment. Mine planners can reassign tasks to alternate resources to
increase productivity.
Seminar data to adjust planning parameters. Production reporting systems provide performance
indicators that combine a range of equipment resources undertaking a number of tasks
because they are not designed to differentiate the mining activities that are similar but
vary subtlety. They are also biased toward the traditional view of process control in that
they are based on performance—the cybernetic model of process control and not process
deviation reporting. Consequently the mining process control and reconciliation fails to be
a method of learning and improvement because the root causes of mine plan discrepancies
are not identified.
Planning Limitations
Unfortunately all planning suffers from the inability of the planner to forecast all
required work and to anticipate all potential problems because not all work can be known
before hand. Planning for conditional activities in the event of problems is also difficult to
achieve in short-range mine planning. At some mines, plans can become obsolete shortly
after mine planners have completed them and the planning processes is too cumbersome
to keep the plans up-to-date with reality. Control of the operation then relies on informal
management because the planning process is too static.
Activity based planning conducted by reasonable planners who understand its strengths
and limitations can improve short-range mine planning. MineSight® Activity Planner is a
tool that can facilitate this process and be a benefit to mine planners who choose to use it.