Engineering & Mining Journal

APR 2013

Engineering and Mining Journal - Whether the market is copper, gold, nickel, iron ore, lead/zinc, PGM, diamonds or other commodities, E&MJ takes the lead in projecting trends, following development and reporting on the most efficient operating pr

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MINING SOF TWARE Multiplication Factor Software designed for mining allow companies to do more with less— as in less time, money and labor By Russell A. Carter, Managing Editor results will be a continuation of what the current generation of mining-related software offers: increased modularity in design to allow tailoring of integrated software packages to specific customer needs; new approaches for compiling, reporting and presenting vast volumes of data in more meaningful ways; and improved collaborative capabilities that cater to widely scattered and often remote workforce locations. Software of various types is involved in every stage of modern mining. In many instances, programs designed for general use are perfectly suitable for mining applications. But increasingly, the demands of a fast-changing industry require capabilities and features tailored more closely to user needs. Here are some examples of the most recent offerings in both types of software products. The soon-to-be-released Micromine 2013 modular software package provides a set of tools for working in detail with drillhole data, including the performance of statistical calculations and DTM surfaces or grids. In military terms, many of the leading software solutions used by the mining industry could be regarded as "force multipliers"— tools or technologies that make a given group more effective than the same group would be without them. It's a capability that's desperately needed by the industry when measured against its skewed workforce demographics, increasingly compressed project planning and scheduling time frames, and rising emphasis on cost control. A chart of the mining industry's workforce age distribution for most of the leading industrial nations would be roughly hammock-shaped, with a peak at one end of the chart representing senior personnel, a lower peak at the other end indicating younger workers just entering the workforce, and a long trough in the middle calling attention to a scarcity of experienced, midcareer workers, technicians, engineers and managers. In the U.S., for example, Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration data show that 46% of the country's energy and mining workforce will be eligible to retire within five years—and it's likely that there will not be enough younger workers available to replace them, leaving mining em56 E&MJ; • APRIL 2013 ployers with an unavoidable need to depend more on technology. It's safe to say that a significant portion of mining's future workforce will be silicon-based devices, not carbon-based life forms, but the need for userfriendly software will be ongoing. The situation presents both an opportunity and a challenge to mining software developers. The opportunity: Younger workers have grown up on a diet of video games, computer-based educational programs and electronic technologies that seem to advance at a logarithmic, not linear, rate; in other words, they're comfortable working with powerful software-based tools in a way that their more-senior workmates and managers may never be. The challenge for software providers is to design programs that perform increasingly sophisticated tasks to meet industry needs, without making those programs too difficult to use by staff members who may not have the time or opportunity to obtain extensive training in their use, or the experience to interpret their results effectively. Advances in computing power, graphics speed and storage capacity will continue to drive software capabilities—and the likely Graphics, on the Ground Eureka, the latest product release from mining technology developer Maptek, is illustrative of the modern software genre. It's designed to help explorationists satisfy the global demand for minerals, according to Maptek CEO Barry Henderson, who noted that the program's ability to allow information to be analyzed and exploited at a very large scale represents a paradigm shift in the way exploration data is used. "A few years ago, an exploration company asked us for help in viewing seismic sections. Our software was 3-D, the sections were in 2-D and they really needed to see where those sections were in 3-D space. Once we'd solved that problem, we realized that we could bring in other types of data and this was the catalyst for developing Eureka," Henderson said. Eureka allows large datasets with millions of points such as airborne magnetic and radiometric surveys, space shuttle topography data and imagery to be viewed in a single 3-D environment. Interacting with the spatially located data in context allows geologists to analyze the relationships, and confirm their intuition. According to Maptek, Eureka offers "much more than a viewing platform." www.e-mj.com

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