Mine Planning and Design
Strategic Mine Scheduling
Cost & Financial Modelling
Corporate Consulting
Strategy Management
Independent Expert
IMC has experience planning and optimising mines in Australia and overseas. IMC’s team has worked in a range of commodities and operation types from open cut coal mining to underground diamond mines. IMC uses a range of CAD programs to plan and design mines combined with optimisation software to deliver optimised mine designs.
As consultants, IMC can assist with the adoption of modern mine planning techniques at the strategic or tactical mine planning level to ensure mines are developed to maximise NPV within the bounds of practical mining.
Our specialisations include:
Multi Mine Planning
IMC can plan, design and optimise a resource requiring multiple mines in different locations. IMC has the ability to schedule multiple mines together to determine which assets can provide the highest value.
Block Model Interpretation and Manipulation
Block model interpretation and manipulation is a core element of sound mine design and optimisation. IMC can read and manipulate block models using bespoke data science programming.
Block Model Re-blocking
Block model re-blocking is the process of modifying the dimensions of the blocks to accurately represent operational practicalities of mining i.e. mining selectivity and bench height studies. For example, a block model with large blocks may be re-blocked into smaller units to improve resolution at ore/waste boundaries, useful when modelling dilution. Using IMC’s in-house data science programs, any block model can be re-blocked, regularised and prepared for optimisation.
Open Pit Mine Design
IMC specialises in designing optimal open pits. Using a combination of the Pseudoflow algorithm and CAD, IMC can generate optimal shells for a deposit. IMC have designed and optimised pits for a range of commodities and organisations ranging from bauxite to diamonds.
Skin Analysis
Skin Analysis takes the undiscounted pit shells defined by Pseudoflow or the Lersch-Grossman algorithm and evaluates incremental NPV of a combination of pushbacks to determine the highest value mining sequence.
Pit shells defined by the Pseudoflow algorithm are only optimal in terms of undiscounted cashflow. For example a final pit stage may contain a substantial amount of pre-strip waste that must be mined before ore is encountered at depth, it is possible that the largest pit shell leads to a negative incremental discounted value compared to a final shell at a lower revenue factor.
Discounted Incremental Value Analysis
Similar to a Skin Anlaysis, Discounted Incremental Value Analysis (DIVA) is a bespoke method of optimising a series of pit shells to maximise NPV. Developed by IMC for complex deposits, pit shells of multiple deposits are compared to other shells simultaneously using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to select the shells that maximise NPV.
This is useful for when multiple deposits feed to single process with a combined constraint. DIVA quickly determines the highest value shell combination with respect to variable costs, fixed costs, processing constraints, stockpile reclaiming and primary equipment requirements.
IMC have a unique mining optimisation process. At IMC we can take block models, generate optimised pit shells, calculate the highest discounted value pit shell and schedule this optimised design. This process can culminate in a zero based cost model to influence decisions. IMC can help with any stage of this process and progress your project.
our blog
