Underground Timing

The diagram above shows the general steps associated with the creation of a mine plan with the Underground Timing routine.  Prerequisites include:

The drawing above shows a simple mineplan layout of longwall and continuous miner panels.  The panel perimeters are drawn on the PERIM layer, and the pillars are on the PILLARS layer.  The panels in this example were placed using Pick and Place.

The Mining Project dialog box above shows some of the key files used in the mine timing.  Options on the right side become active depending on the items selected on the left side.

The underground timing scheduling dialog box provides options to assign panels to be mined to the equipment, insert delays between panels, input the plan start date, number of shifts/day, and undo the current report. Disregard the bottleneck options for underground mining.  The underground timing routine calculates the time needed to complete the assignment, calculates coal quantities and qualities, draws results period by period, and produces a production report. In the order to calculate timing, every panel needs to be assigned to equipment. The left list box lists the available equipment. Use Add button to create a new equipment or edit to change the definition of the defined one. This list is stored within the mine plan and is different for every plan. The Edit button calls the same dialog as the Define Equipment function.

The middle list box shows panels currently assigned to the crew highlighted in the left list box (if any). To assign a panel to the equipment, first click on the equipment name, then on the panel name in the right listbox and at last on the Assign button. Panels are mined in the same order as they appear in the list. To complete mining of all assigned panels successfully the order should not be controversial (i.e. NMAINS <1:2> can not appear before NMAINS <B:1>). To change sequence of mining click on the desired panel name and use Do Earlier or Do Later buttons to change the order. The Remove button removes the highlighted panel from the list of the panels assigned to the current crew and moves it to the right list box. Use Add Delay button to add delay (for moving of equipment, maintenance or other reason) after highlighted panel. After all panels for first crew has been added click the next crew and repeat until all the panels needed are added.

The Use Precedence option will apply the settings defined in the Mining Precedence Rules under the Settings of the Timing Project Manager.

Screen Pick will allow for selecting the panels graphically on the screen. Each panel is hatched with solid fill to give instant feedback that the panel has been assigned. If pin points are in the panel, it will only hatch up to the next pin point, allowing the panel to be assigned in order as separate entities. When the assignment is completed click the Calculate button. Check the timing report produced and make sure that all assigned panels have been developed. If the process terminates earlier, the rest of the plan was inaccessible for some sequencing reason. Modify the assignment if needed and click Calculate again. During retreat mining it is possible that a sub-panel will be completed later that the panel itself. If this conflict occurs the calculation algorithm will try to offset start date of the panel itself to get timeout sufficient to resolve the problem. In the case when a problem could not be resolved an alert box with corresponding message will appear.

The time needed to develop a panel is offset by the Extraction Ratio and Difficulty Factor defined in the Edit Panel Dialog, and thickness and density of coal and rock defined by the Edit Panel Attributes function. The presence of qualities in the production report depends on the list of panel attributes and their values defined by the Edit Panel Attributes function.

In cases when the mine plan includes retreat (second) mining, the system will make sure that when the parent panel is mined on retreat, the mining (advance or retreat) in all child panels is completed. If not it tries to offset the starting date of retreat in the parent panel until the timing conflict is resolved. Sometimes it is impossible to do so and program reports the problem to user for manual resolution.

Report Options Details of each function are below.

Periods

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If the development progress is not satisfactory and the scheduling needs to be adjusted, use Undo Report button in Timing dialog to remove drawn report entities.  After the dialog is completed, the mining development is shown step by step and then the production report is generated. The report format may be modified to suite the particular need and preferred format saved for further use. See HELP for complete description of Report Formatting dialog. There is a progress window displaying the time elapsed and the time remaining for large schedules that require a lot of time.

The Report Formatter has several output options: Report
 The Report tab outputs ASCII text reports as shown below:The above report is an example of an Ascii text report in Non-columnar format.The above report is an example of a columnar Ascii text report.The report above is an example of an Ascii text report in spreadview.

The User Attributes button under Settings leads to a dialog where custom attributes can be created.

The Attribute options opens with a list of the attributes above, providing display and formatting options below.

MS Excel

When the MS Excel tab is open reports can be exported directly to new or existing spreadsheets, beginning on any specified sheet, row and column.  There are also options to include totals and text header information in the file.  When the options have been specified click on the Export to Excel button.  The spreadsheet below was exported using this option.Import/Export Options

At the Export button under Import/Export tab there are 6 options under Export.

RPT format reports can be merged together, as shown above.  The RPT reports are the reports that can be loaded and viewed even after the underground timing routine is closed, and accessed at a later time.

Prompts

Select any part of mine plan: Pick any centerline in the mine plan
Underground Timing Dialog

Pull-Down Menu Location: Underground
Keyboard Command: schedule_mine