BHP Olympic Dam's transformation to live implicit modelling and innovative solutions to working in data dense environments

摘要

Effective use of live data informing real-time decision making is becoming increasingly prevalent within the mining industry, as users seek to leverage more value from their investment in geological data collection. This remains the core of the ongoing project to modernise the data handling and modelling processes at Olympic Dam. This paper describes the innovative transformation of the Olympic Dam geological model from sound practice to leading edge, enabled by industry leading model management and database solutions. Traditionally holistic model updates of Olympic Dam were problematic due to the size of the deposit and the vast quantity of historical data. Explicit modelling methods were inflexible and time intensive, leading to delays in model releases. However, initial implementations of implicit modelling methods were hampered by computational limitations in processing of the very large data sets. A new approach to allow data segregation and manageable data handling was required.