Chronos for BHP Cannington

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011


Mining engineers from BHP Billiton’s Cannington site were recently trained in the newly acquired Vulcan Chronos scheduling module.

Maptek staff flew to Townsville to train Douglas Suk and Karthikeyan Nadarajan. Vulcan Product Manager, Eric Gonzalez, who was visiting Australia from Denver at the time, took the opportunity to share his Chronos expertise.BHP Billiton is in the final pre-feasibility stage to move operations towards a combined underground and open pit at Cannington, with excavation due to start in mid 2012. The mine planning engineers will use Chronos to set up a long-term schedule, programming the first two years on a monthly basis, followed by quarterly periods, to create a 5-10 year plan.

Eric Gonzalez claims that ‘enhancements to Chronos in Vulcan 8.1, involving multi-threading and tuning parameters, reduce the time required to run mine schedule optimisations by up to 99%’.

Alison Farrah (Maptek), Douglas Suk (BHP Billiton), Mike Winfield and Eric Gonzalez (Maptek), and Karthikeyan Nadarajan (BHP Billiton)



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