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 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, as this is intended for the Surface Equipment Timing command.  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 order to calculate timing, every panel needs to be assigned to a piece of equipment. The left list box shows the available equipment. Use the Add Unit button to create a new piece of equipment or edit to change the definition of the defined equipment. This list is stored within the mine plan and is different for every plan. The Edit Unit button calls the same dialog as the Define Equipment function.
The middle list box shows panels currently assigned to the equipment 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 list box 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> cannot appear before NMAINS <B:1>). To change sequence of mining click on the desired panel name and use the 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 the Add Delay button to add a delay (for moving of equipment, maintenance or other reason) after the highlighted panel. After all panels for the first piece of equipment have been added, you may repeat the process for each piece of equipment until all the needed panels are properly assigned.

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 you to assign panels to equipment by actually selecting them on the screen. Each panel is hatched with a 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 assignments are complete, click the Calculate button. Check the timing report produced and make sure that all assigned panels have been developed. If the process terminates before all panels are calculated, you may need to modify the assignment and try recalculating the timing. 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 the start date of the panel itself to get timeout sufficient to resolve the problem. In the case when a problem cannot 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 the program reports the problem to the user for manual resolution.
The Skip COAL for timing option can be ignored for Underground Timing, as this option is intended for Surface Equipment Timing.

Once panels have been assigned to the various equipment, the assignments can be saved to a .tim or a .csv file. Both can be edited with a simple text editing program such as Notepad, but the .tim format is not as user-friendly as the .csv format. When exported to a .csv, you can very easily editing the timing assignments in Microsoft Excel, then load the timing assignments back into the Underground Timing dialog. In the .csv format, the first column is the equipment name and the second column is the panel name. An example of this file type is shown below:

Multi-Level Mining

If a mine has multiple levels with similar panels stacked above one another, a special set of layer names must be used when creating the panels to allow for the distinction between levels. The key to distinguishing mining levels is setting the linework on the correct layer names, which must use a suffix similar to ‘_LEVELX’. For example, the mine plan in the below figure has three levels. The linework for the first level includes the following layers: MINEPLTX, PILLARS_LEVELX,  MINEPLAN, and PERIM_LEVELX. When these panels were made using the Auto Place Panel by Text, the panel name was on a layer named PANELNM_LEVEL1 and the panel perimeter was on a layer named PERIM_LEVEL1. Levels 2 and 3 were made in a similar fashion, but with the respective level name as the suffix for each layer. Although it isn’t necessary, the linework for each level in the below image has been drawn at a specific elevation to allow for further visual inspection by the 3DORBIT command.

After the panels have been created, you may also inspect the mining level via the Edit Panel command, which will allow you to enter the Level Layer Suffix, as outlined in red below.

Report Options Details of each function are below.






If the development progress is not satisfactory and the scheduling needs to be adjusted, use the Undo Report button in the 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 a spread view.

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