In this video
Heath Arvidson
Chief Geoscientist
Mark Forster
Chief Development Officer
Mark:
The first one is really being driven from an automation perspective, and that is, one of the issues you have is we were talking about ore blocker and how it can automatically block out a blast, this particular customer wants to block out a whole bench at a time. So as Heath was talking about doing RC drilling, get ahead of the game, and then actually block out an entire bench.
And the reason for that. Traditionally blast design doesn’t take geology into consideration. So quite often what you can do is you can end up diluting high-grade ore because of the poor mine design or blast design, I should say. Whereas if you block out an entire bench, it allows you to look at the grade blocks that have been generated during that process, design your blast around, and then later on re-optimize again when you actually come to block out that blast.
So one of the reasons, model manager is important in that scenario is you’ve gotta be able to extract all the block model cells for that particular bench from potentially a very large block model, and in a traditional database that is problematic because they’re just run too slowly.
Whereas the technology that model managers based on allows us to retrieve the data quickly and optimize quickly.
Heath:
Another aspect of this problem is that the models are generated in general mine planning packages. They’re generated in a data mine or a Vulcan, a desktop application. And they exist as proprietary format binary files. Our model manager solution breaks that paradigm because it doesn’t care what mine planning package you use. It doesn’t care where the model comes from. You know, part of the process is set up a format, import the data, and now it’s in a database that is accessible from any sort of tool that you want to use to look at that information. That’s a real key advantage.
Mark:
And then just picking up on that. So as Heath mentioned earlier, obviously it’s important for clients because they’re doing a lot of work in the data science and machine learning space so that data is accessible. Also from a business intelligence perspective, you can use business intelligence tools to tap into that data, but one of the points we’re making is traditional relational databases have never been able to handle this volume of data. You know, they’re not used to having a single block of data as it were that’s 500 gigabytes or a terabyte in size. So model managers based on very specific analytic technology that allows it to deal with block models, with hundreds or thousands of attributes and millions or billions of records.
