MineRP Enables Seamless Visualization Of Complex Mining Data With HOOPS Visualize

The Challenge

MineRP is an internationally recognized mining software and consulting company with global headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. Founded in 1997, the company has an international presence and a reputation for developing innovative technology and solutions for the mining industry. “The old ways of solving mining issues are not valid anymore,” said Empie Strydom, Vice President of Marketing at MineRP. “As a company, we are focused on completely novel approaches to the problems that mining companies face. Instead of adding more tools, our integration platform solves the hard problems that standalone mining applications cannot even attempt.” The challenges around mining are numerous, starting with the simple fact that most of the easy-to-reach deposits of valuable metals, minerals, fossil fuels, and other materials within the earth have already been tapped. The remaining ore bodies are hidden away in ever deeper, hard-to-reach pockets. Coming up with a viable way to understand the ore body and its potential financial value, plan the mining and excavation, and execute the job efficiently requires generating and bringing together large amounts of data about the mineral resource being mined. As an example, geological block models, which can often be massive in size, are one of the most critical pieces of data for making an informed decision about where to dig. “A geology block model with 30 million records in it would actually be on the small-ish side,” noted Anton Van Der Walt, Chief Digital Officer at MineRP. “It’s not unusual to have terabytes of data representing Mine Technical Datasets.” MineRP’s key innovation has been to integrate these masses of geological data with other datasets – from mine planning, design, and scheduling to ERP systems, IoT systems, and other systems required to run a modern mine – to give mining customers a single integrated platform for all their mining data. But in order to enable customers to bring together and spatially visualize, analyze, and even animate disconnected datasets within its MineRP Platform, the company needed a foundation of powerful visualization capabilities.

Creating an Integrated Platform with Robust Visualization

HOOPS Visualize – the gold standard for high performance 3D visualization – provided an ideal solution for MineRP. As the industry’s leading visualization toolkit, HOOPS Visualize powers advanced graphics in hundreds of engineering applications around the globe, enabling the delivery of stunning 3D graphics. “We’ve standardized on HOOPS Visualize across the entire MineRP Platform,” said Van Der Walt. “All visualization is done through a single visualization module that relies on HOOPS Visualize – we don’t use anyone else’s graphics technology.” Van Der Walt added, “We looked at several other graphic engines, but HOOPS Visualize stood out in terms of performance, the number of features available in the engine, and the support provided by Tech Soft 3D. As far as graphics engines go, it’s the best that we have found, and it’s a very, very important part of the technology stack inside our platform.” Using the MineRP Platform, customers can easily visualize complex mining data and use it to optimize their mining operations. “A customer can look at their mine, quickly identify the low-grade and high-grade areas, and then decide where they want to focus their extraction efforts,” said Strydom. “For example, in response to changing commodity prices or product demand, they might want to only target specific areas of the mineral reserve which will yield the optimal ore for the current market demand. Alternately, they might want to examine overbreak and underbreak: areas that they shouldn’t have mined into at all, and areas where they didn’t mine enough and left some of the valuable ore behind. All this kind of rich information becomes very actionable for mining companies when it is brought together and visualized.” As the company moves forward, it will continue to draw upon its partnership with Tech Soft 3D to give its customers a comprehensive, integrated platform with powerful visualization and analysis capabilities. “The MineRP platform is some of the best mining software out there,” said Van Der Walt. “That’s partially because of the deep industry expertise of our people, but it’s also because we’ve got a brilliant technology stack. We have world-class partners like Tech Soft 3D supplying the best-of-breed technologies that we use in our platform – and that ensures we can continue tackling the toughest challenges and problems for our customers in the mining industry.”

Industry: Mining

Challenge: Mining customers increasingly challenged to find untapped ore bodies and efficiently excavate them - Lack of integration between different mining systems present fragmented view of mine operations - Geological models, mine plans, schedules, and point clouds and other Mine Technical datasets that need to be visualized can contain millions of records representing terabytes of data

Solution: HOOPS Visualize serves as the graphics engine for the MineRP Platform, delivering powerful 3D visualization capabilities across the entire solution

Results: Keep pace with mining customer needs by creating a single integrated workspace for mine planning and execution - Easily visualize very large and complex geological models, providing users with insights that guide better and more profitable decisions - Maintain company reputation as industry innovator by ensuring the MineRP platform takes advantage of best-of-breed technologies