April 21, 2010 - Ottawa, Canada

Canadian 3D software technology company ThreeDify announced the release of a new version of their FlowPit, pit limit optimization software that can compute a pit design solution many times faster than competing technology.

Open pit mines are typically designed with block models, which represent the material inside the pit using millions of "blocks" of a predefined volume. The computation required to determine the optimum pit boundary (basically the shape of an open pit mine when it reaches the end of its economic life) are typically time consuming. ThreeDify believes that the latest release of their software represents a genuine performance breakthrough for mine planning  engineers.

"The advantage of our technology becomes obvious when handling very large orebodies," explained ThreeDify CEO Yaohong D. Jiang. "Typically, determining the optimal pit limit would take a long time – over 24 hours or even days for a block model of about 4 million blocks. With FlowPit, we can now arrive at the optimum solution in less than 2 hours on today's 64-bit commodity PCs (1 hour 45 minutes on a Gateway NV79 laptop running 64-bit Windows 7) – more than an order of magnitude faster."

This advance in computational speed, coupled with the ability to output nested pit per bench, makes FlowPit an effective tool not just for determining the optimal pit limit, but also for short or medium term planning of large open-pit mines where mine planners frequently need quick and reliable answers to "what if?" questions.

ThreeDify is a new 3D software company located in Ottawa, Ontario which creates a range of solutions including 3D tools for industry. They are primarily known for their more mainstream products, which include Office Designer, an add-in for Microsoft Office that allows users to add 3D content to ordinary documents.