Rapidly create final pit designs with Deswik.SPD
Deswik Strategic Pit Design (Deswik.SPD) is a module developed in direct response to our client’s needs. Our customers wanted a way to rapidly create practical pit designs from optimization outputs as part of their strategic planning process. With Deswik.SPD, users can now quickly generate multiple pit designs for any number of optimization runs, compare results and select go-forward cases. Final pit designs which took days to create manually can now be created in minutes, enabling planners to spend less time doing repetitive design tasks and more time analyzing results and evaluating options.
Deswik.SPD features the Automated Pit Design tool which bridges the gap between optimization shells and a detailed manual pit design. The tool uses a scenario-based approach to rapidly generate, visualize and compare pit designs using outputs from Deswik.GO, Pseudoflow or other pit optimization software such as Whittle. The tool is flexible and is able to provide the following features:
- Supports multiple ramp rules, exclusion zones and geotechnical domains for wall angle and berm width rules
- Provides post-processing options to smooth pit designs
- Integrates with our manual pit design and reserving tools, for more detailed scheduling, or to pass back into Deswik.GO for high level phase-bench schedules.
Any number of scenarios can be created with Deswik.SPD. Once processing is complete, the output designs are summarized in a table in rank order for review. Furthermore, if the results are not quite what you were after, you can use the fine-tuning options to manually adjust the output designs. There are options to add a new ramp chain, move ramp chains to close large gaps, add switchbacks, manually adjust the berm shape and split ramps in two.
“Deswik’s Strategic Pit Design module (Deswik.SPD) produces multiple pit designs in the time it takes a mining engineer to design a single bench. By having a multitude of pit designs provided by Deswik.SPD, our mine planning team has been able to tactically implement the most suitable design and consider concepts that could often be overlooked when completing only a single design.
Deswik.SPD also allows us to customize inputs that result in practical designs complying with site specific requirements, such as block model-based berm and batter parameters, dynamic ramp widths and gradients, ramp exit positions and exclusions zones. It has eliminated hundreds of hours of pit design work and allowed us to focus on adding value in more opportune areas.” — Tim Rijsdijk, Glencore Copper
To view a demonstration of Deswik.SPD watch the video below, contact your nearest Deswik office, or refer to the 2020.3 release notes and documentation in Deswik Help.
