Thursday, March 17th, 2022
The breadth of applications for DomainMCF has surprised even its creators, less than a year after the machine learning engine’s release.
Maptek released DomainMCF in April 2021 on the belief that there had to be faster way to generate geological domains from drillhole and other data.
This would remove bottlenecks in providing resource models for mine planning and investment in new projects.
The machine learning engine has already been adopted in Australia, Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas, and the variety of applications is unexpected.
Technical Lead, DomainMCF Steve Sullivan says the ‘bread and butter’ application on release was to help with resource geology and grade control.
‘Since that time we’ve had people take the tool in lots of different directions and it’s surprised us how broad the use has been,’ Sullivan says.
‘There are customers using it for geotechnical modeling, for underground platinum mines and people looking at drill and blast scenarios with measurement while drilling. Also financial people are applying it to assess projects quickly.’
The value of DomainMCF presents differently, depending on the use case.
‘People working in the geotechnical area are getting information that they couldn’t possibly model before.
‘In some instances they’re modelling structures down to 10cm – so very, very small structures which are critical underground, especially when you’ve got a narrow opening to work with.
‘On the other hand, people in resource geology are finding they can build models in minutes or hours on projects that took many days or weeks to compile before.’
Potential investors are using the machine learning technology as a rapid first-pass assessment tool to gain a competitive advantage.
‘Within a couple of hours they can make an assessment on whether a project is going to meet their criteria.
‘If it does then they can go into a deeper, more extensive survey and if not they can eliminate the option quickly and move on to the next one.’
Having presented at a number of events throughout 2021, Sullivan looks forward to speaking at conferences such as the AusIMM International Mining Geology Conference in Brisbane, and the AIG Structural Geology and Resources Symposium in Kalgoorlie later in 2022.
Development of DomainMCF is ongoing, delivering on functionality and improvements requested by Maptek customers and its internal success consultants.
Updates being delivered in 2022 include a grade trends tool and enhanced graphs and charts and statistical analysis capabilities for validation.
Maptek, with DomainMCF, is the first to deliver a viable solution to digest, analyse, compute and model this new world data, efficiently and cost effectively.
‘Customers are now solving problems where other solutions have failed,’ concluded Sullivan.
‘Processing large amounts of data quickly is a necessity, not an option, in our data-rich world.’
