The standalone longwall mine simulation package called FACETS (Face Time Simulator), which takes into account components at the longwall coal face to determine production, some cost data and helps determine critical paths.

“For instance, if you increase your shear capacity, [it helps determine] the next critical link in the system that’s not going to keep up with that,” Runge general manager Australasia John Buffington told Australia’s Mining Monthly.

“The goal with FACETS then is to take it from being just the longwall face simulation tool to looking at your whole coal clearance system to pit head,” he said.

Currently, FACETS has visualisation components that show a shearer moving along the face with advance of the shields and armoured face conveyor (AFC).

“It has a neat little dashboard on there to show you speeds and productivity rates,” Buffington said. “It can actually move those factors up and down by a varying number of parameters with respect to the various number of components on your wall.

“It’ll show you actual shear as it’s cutting. You can look and see what actual portion of the face is cut, and it then shows individual shields moving across. You can move them across individually or in pairs. So you can get a feel for what’s going on in that visual sense, rather than just numbers being generated.

“It has a lot of graphic capabilities then to automatically look at various parameters by incremental amounts. You can get graphs to show what effect a 1% increase in say, cutting speed or AFC speed, has on productivity.”

Runge is also working on a project called Mining Dynamics, which is about data management and flow.

“It’s about integrating data right from your borehole data through to your bottom, line data,” Buffington said. “We’re starting on a couple of projects at the moment where we’re incorporating a number of databases and integrating those so that it can all come up on one screen.

“Effectively, when you make a change at the marketing end, [you will be able to] take that right back to what impact that has on your mine. It’s the full gamut. [There will be] a full auditability of data streams, data flows and forecasting and planning processes.”

Buffington has been with Runge for six years. He completed a mining engineering degree at Queensland University, and has spent almost 20 years in both the opencut and underground coal mining industry in both Australia and the United States.

When AMM spoke with Buffington in October, Runge was in the process of demonstrating FACETS to a major mining player. He said he expected several of its customers worldwide to have the system up and running by Christmas.

“We’ll eventually be able to use it in XPAC (Runge’s business-oriented mine scheduling application) and call on it within XPAC to look at various production scenarios,” Buffington said. “But that’s a couple of years down the track before we incorporate it as a push button function in XPAC. At the moment it’s standalone.”

Also lurking on the Runge horizon is a short-term scheduling package called Xact.

Xact fulfils a need that manifested in Runge customers who were using XPAC, but needed a shorter-term scheduling package.

“We’ve found that XPAC has always provided and excellent level of detail for strategic and longer-term planning, but a lot of our customers – for ease and flexibility – have been using spreadsheets to do shorter-term scheduling,” Buffington said.

“What Xact allows you to do is have some of the functionality of XPAC, but you’ve actually got Gantt charts [where] you can drag and drop lines of either equipment or resources that you need to mine, within the schedule.

“So you can see your drill and blast, your waste removal and your ore removal – all in the Gantt chart functionality and move those things around to suit, along with different pieces of equipment.”

Buffington said the plan was to take Xact to the market as a genuine short-term scheduling product, and that it would have substantially more flexibility than the larger XPAC tool.

As is common in the mining software marketplace, Buffington says there are few competitors offering products that are directly comparable with those of Runge.

“With FACETS, there are no competitors that we know of out there on that longwall simulation front. The only ones are Joy and DBT (the longwall mining equipment manufacturers), which have their own in-house systems.

“But there is not a general independent product on the market that we know of that does quite what FACETS does.”

With regards to Xact, Buffington said Runge’s main competitor was Bill Gates and his Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project systems.

And when you can count Bill Gates as a competitor, business can’t be too bad.

Further details on Runge’s FACETS package will be featured in Australian Longwall Magazine’s software feature in the March edition.

Australia’s Mining Monthly