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Tips from Tech Support

Volume 24, Number 4, April 2008

MineSight Activity Planner: A Planning Board-based Approach to Scheduling

Introduction
MineSight Activity Planner (MSAP) is a new tool in the MineSight suite of programs designed primarily for short-range planners. It uses a Planning Board approach to graphically plan daily, weekly, or monthly schedules. It bases the schedule on resource availability, both machinery and labor, to achieve the target. The figure above shows the precision level of the various MineSight optimization and scheduling applications. It is apparent that MSAP can be used to schedule very precise schedules with a high degree of accuracy. The high precision of MSAP arises from the use of mine specific work calendars, the possibility of incorporating detailed changes, and the ability to incorporate other minute details which are usually avoided and impractical in long-term scheduling.

Why MSAP?
There are two primary methods of scheduling: 1. Target based scheduling 2. Activity based scheduling
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Inside This Issue:

2008 Training Schedule... page 11 Current Affairs: Smoothing Corners in Attach Template and Using a Polyline Tube in the Autoslicer Tool.. page 5 Tips from Tech Support MineSight Activity Planner: A Planning Board-based Approach to Scheduling... page 1 Tip of the Month: Hot Keys... page 9 Mintec Directory... page 10 Mintec, Inc. Celebrates 25th Annual Seminar... page 10 Trade Shows and Seminars... page 12 Web-based Training... page 12

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Though both of these forms of scheduling use targets and resources to obtain a feasible schedule, an important differentiating factor between the two is the resolution of the tracking of the resources. The traditional form of scheduling (target-based) is based on scheduling for a larger time period by adjusting the targets of smaller fixed time periods. For example, a life-of-mine schedule is essentially a queue of scheduled targets based on yearly schedules. This is achieved by targeting the production or some other controlling values to achieve the highest Net Present Value (NPV) while constraining the solution based on some physical and geometrical constraints. Though it serves well for longer term scheduling, the high number of interdependent constraints make it unfeasible for short-term mine planning due to the difficulty of expressing the whole system as a set of formulae. Also, no two mines are exactly the same and the differences are all the more exacerbated in the short-term. Another methodology uses simulation to achieve the objective. However, simulation also has its disadvantages. Apart from being quite time consuming, it doesnt give the planner enough flexibility to try various scenarios. The Planning Board method of planning (activity-based scheduling) has been used quite often to solve these types of problems. MSAP is a product that uses this type of approach for scheduling.

his unit operations such that the amount of impact on his total schedule is minimized. Similarly, if an engineer encounters a breakdown in machinery after the cuts have been planned, he can adjust the plans to minimize the impact of the breakdown. The present version allows manual changes to adjust the schedule, but this will be improved in version 2 of MSAP to incorporate changes automatically. Workflow MSAP is designed primarily as a short-term mine scheduling tool. Thus, it is most useful for scheduling of cuts in open pit operations or development and mining areas (stopes) in underground operations. The cuts are usually designed using MineSight Interactive Planner (MSIP). These cuts can be directly imported with their attributes into MSAP for scheduling. However, in practice, mines typically have a very large number of designed cuts (sometimes over 1,000). These cuts can certainly be imported into MSAP, but scheduling them graphically can be a daunting challenge. A soonto-be-released new MineSight tool, MineSight Schedule Optimizer (MSSO) can be used to automatically schedule the cuts. MSSO can import MSIP cuts from AGDM database and schedule them into a series of linear programming problems based on targets, precedence and product quality, and quantity requirements. The output of MSSO is the optimum mining sequence of cuts within each period. These cuts can then be imported into MSAP by filtering on the period and mining sequence attributes and then scheduled. These cuts can then be imported into MSAP by filtering on the Period ID and then scheduled. MSAP uses a work calendar approach to scheduling and thus the start and end dates of the activities are in real time. The work calendar approach allows mines to modify the working hours (scheduling units) exactly as per the mine requirements to allow for nonworking days, etc. It may, however, be noted
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MSAP Planning Methodology

MSAP allows the short-term mine planner to think, plan, and schedule in terms of his unit operations, availability, and performance of equipment and labor. This will allow a planning engineer to estimate (both intuitively as well as by looking at historical records) the resources which he will have at his disposal during the next time period and plan his actions accordingly. For example, if the engineer knows that a drill operator for a particular drill will be on vacation for a particular set of days, he can arrange

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that work calendars are generic to mines and are not specific to resource type. For example, we presently cannot separate work calendars for drill crews and mining crews. Future versions of MSAP will incorporate this feature. This will be most useful for mines where maintenance scheduling uses a different calendar (normally includes Saturdays as working days) as opposed to production scheduling. These dates associated with each cut can then be exported to MSIP. This will allow the engineer to plan how the cuts should be mined and how the equipment can be utilized to achieve the objective. This should be a useful tool for daily manpower and equipment planning for the planning engineer. The figure below gives an overview of the complete workflow. It should be noted that use of MSSO is optional. MSAP can import the cuts directly from MSIP and schedule them.

4. Attribute Types: Define the properties of the resource types (e.g., speed of truck). For the purposes of reports and charts, attributes can be accumulated by sum, average, or weighted average method. MSAP has three types of attributes, namely: a. Generic Attributes: Describe uniform and fixed properties of resources (e.g., shovel bucket size). b. Activity Rate Attributes: Provide the rate properties of an activity which are used to define the activity duration (e.g., shovel loading rate). c. Activity Size Attributes: Vary by time as they are utilized by resources in the plan (e.g., tonnes of material in a cut and its ore and waste portions). 5. Activity Types: Describe the unit operations needed to perform a task in a plan (e.g., mining cuts or drilling cuts). 6. Schedule: Consists of the specific resources and activities. Their properties have to be predefined in the dictionary. 7. Work Calendar: Used to specify the working and non-working days and hours of the mine.

MSAP Terminology
Since mining terminologies have different meanings within different contexts, a brief review of the MSAP terminology is given below. 1. MSAP Plan: Consists of three partsdictionary, schedule, and work calendar. 2. Dictionary: Contains information about the types of resources, their attributes, and types of activities that can be created using the resources. Dictionaries can be shared among schedules. 3. Resource Types: The generic resources available for the plan (such as truck, shovel, drill jumbo, blast crew, cut, stope, and haul road).

8. Planning Board: Provides a resource-based view of the plan while the Gantt chart displays the activities in which the resources are involved. This can be used to easily maximize resource usage while minimizing resource conflicts. The Planning Board shows only one resource type per view. It can also be used for error handling.
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Planning in MSAP
The figure below shows a typical flowchart for MSAP. It should be noted that the first four steps refer to creating the dictionary which can be imported for subsequent schedules. The process is explained in detail following the figure.

1. Create Resource Type: Prior to running MSAP, it is advisable to list all the resource types such as trucks, shovels, drills, etc. used and their attributes such as speed of the truck. Most of this information can be found from the specification booklets of the equipment as well as historical records. Resources for the mining cuts such as tonnes of ore and waste and grades can be imported from MSIP. 2. Create Attribute Types: Generic attributes such as haul-rate, etc. are created and their accumulation method is specified. 3. Map Attributes to Resource Types: The attributes are mapped to the resource types. In some cases, a given attribute may be used by more than one Resource Type, e.g., operating cost may be used by trucks, shovels, etc. 4. Create Activity Types Based on Resource Types and Attributes: New activities (such as drilling) can be created using previously defined attributes (such as attributes from drills and mining cuts).

5. Add/Import Resource: The attributes are added to the schedule and the values for the same are assigned. For example, haul rate as 200 tons/ hour. These could also be imported from a database or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. MSIP data in the database can also be imported during this process. 6. Adding Activities/Tasks: Specific activities such as mining Cut 3 in Level 2495 will be added at this stage. The initial planning is done in the Planning Board view at this stage. 7. Adding Constraints: Constraints are added between pairs of activities. Constraints can be End to End, End to Start, Start to End, or Start to Start. They are quite self-explanatory. For example, an End to End constraint would imply that Activity 2 cant end until Activity 1 ends and End to Start would mean that Activity 2 has to end before the start of Activity 1. 8. Schedule and Report: The activities can be scheduled on the Planning Board while enforcing the constraint rules, oversharing rules, and overlapping rules. Reports can be generated using Crystal Reports technology, and subsequently can be exported to .PDF format, or printed directly. Clients can download the following papers presented at the 2007 Mintec Annual Seminar which explains the above method in detail from www. mintec.com/seminars/: Introduction to MSAP.pdf, Scheduling Open Pit Operations with MSAP.pdf, Scheduling Underground Operations with MSAP.pdf.

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