Employer: Ellatzite-Med AD
Contractor: Ellatzite-Med AD and Modular Mining Systems, Inc., USA
Project implementation period: October 2015 - October 2016 

In order to achieve an even higher efficiency of the production process, Ellatzite-Med AD continued the upgrade of the Dispatch® mining production management system, which works efficiently in Ellatzite Mine from 2015. In 2016, the ProVision® system, also a product of Modular Mining Systems, Inc., USA, was implemented.

This is a GPS positioning system with a precision of 0.1 m on any machine - an excavator or a drill rig, which uses the location of the machine to determine its activity.

Location tasks are delivered electronically in a suitable work format directly to the ProVision® database by engineers and specialists. When performing the location tasks, all the completed actions, as well as the final result – the exact drilling, the excavating of the material within the limits, the achieved level of the mining bench, etc., are recorded on the database.  

The excavators in Ellatzite Mine are equipped with high-precision GPS receivers, as well as platform inclinometers for determining the excavator inclination axis, and for the drill rigs an inclinometer added for the drill tower, which accurately determines the azimuth of drilling.

“Using these technologies, Ellatzite-Med AD succeeded in achieving 99% precision implementation of the wellheads, as well as reduction of the drilling depth offsets with 50%” - says Eng. Mladen Nedkov, Deputy Director of ICT Directorate at Ellatzite-Med AD.

By achieving the indicated drilling accuracy, the costs of unnecessary drilling are reduced and the effectiveness of blasting operations is increased - blasted linear meters of drilling per cubic meter of mining mass are 9.8% less than those in 2016 and 2017.

For the excavators, besides the accurate execution of excavating homogenous blocks tasks, the new ProVision® system has achieved also a 0.05 m. average deviation from the design cut-off height, according to the data obtained from surveying measurements. This can be considered as an absolutely accurate implementation of the technological assignment, which reduces the costs of iterated excavation and dumping of already completed work sites.

Continuous monitoring and control of the entire process is done by mining dispatcher who has the ability to manage and monitor all the activity in the mine from the control center. All other engineers and specialists in the company, who are involved in controlling the performance of the above tasks, they may at any time perform both control and adjustment and additions to the technological assignments.

The implementation of Dispatch and ProVision® is one of the examples of the ongoing investment in modern technologies for increasing automation and improving resource efficiency and effectiveness in Ellatzite-Med AD.