The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
A giant 3D television displayed two separate animations of coloured rectangle s that appeared at seemingly random areas on the screen. The coloured rectangles — and they covered the entire spectrum of a rainbow — represented different mine areas, and appeared on screen in the order they should be developed.
The animation was a visual representation of mine scheduling and showcased the differences between a schedule that was put together manually, and another that was created by an algorithm developed at Laurentian University.
Scheduling ore extraction at a mine may seem like a mundane task at first, but tweaking the extraction order for peak mine performance can increase the net value of a mining operation by up to 20%.
Researchers at Laurentian’s Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation (MIRARCO) developed a software solution called the schedule optimization tool, or SOT for short.
The technology helps mining companies save time and money before they start digging for minerals, and has been used by a number of companies, including Vale and Xstrata.
Lorrie Fava, MIRARCO’s program manager of ventilation and production optimization, said the program cuts down greatly on the amount of time companies need to dedicate to scheduling a new mine site.