Uploaded September 2016 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
In the world of multi-billion-dollar mining enterprises, maintenance shutdowns are inevitable… and costly.
Just one hour of maintenance downtime can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue.
Working in close collaboration with market-leading mining services firm Linkforce Engineering, Ryan Loxton and his research team have developed cutting-edge algorithms that reduce maintenance downtime costs and optimise resource use in shutdowns.
These algorithms are powering a new purpose-built shutdown scheduling software that is unrivalled in the marketplace.
It’s able to analyse the mass of complex, often conflicting, operational factors that go into shutdown planning from minimising resource use and prioritising high-value activities to reducing personnel travel times and satisfying safety requirements.
Where manual scheduling takes weeks and introduces human error, this system generates an optimal schedule in less than a second making for a smoother shutdown with less risk of costly overruns.
The latest version of the system combines the core optimisation algorithms with critical user functionality, including:
- a modern, intuitive interface;
- a database for storing shutdown requirements and optimal schedules
- connectivity tools for sharing data with other systems
- and automatic calculation of various analytics and key performance indicators.
Rigorously tested against actual shutdown scenarios, the system consistently delivered shorter and… crucially… always feasible schedules resulting in significant customer savings.
This exciting new technology is ready to impact the multi-billion-dollar Australian mine maintenance market, with strong prospects for quick expansion into other industries.
In the world of multi-billion-dollar mining enterprises, maintenance shutdowns are inevitable… and costly.
Just one hour of maintenance downtime can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue.
Working in close collaboration with market-leading mining services firm Linkforce Engineering, Ryan Loxton and his research team have developed cutting-edge algorithms that reduce maintenance downtime costs and optimise resource use in shutdowns.
These algorithms are powering a new purpose-built shutdown scheduling software that is unrivalled in the marketplace.
It’s able to analyse the mass of complex, often conflicting, operational factors that go into shutdown planning from minimising resource use and prioritising high-value activities to reducing personnel travel times and satisfying safety requirements.
Where manual scheduling takes weeks and introduces human error, this system generates an optimal schedule in less than a second making for a smoother shutdown with less risk of costly overruns.
The latest version of the system combines the core optimisation algorithms with critical user functionality, including:
- a modern, intuitive interface;
- a database for storing shutdown requirements and optimal schedules
- connectivity tools for sharing data with other systems
- and automatic calculation of various analytics and key performance indicators.
Rigorously tested against actual shutdown scenarios, the system consistently delivered shorter and… crucially… always feasible schedules resulting in significant customer savings.
This exciting new technology is ready to impact the multi-billion-dollar Australian mine maintenance market, with strong prospects for quick expansion into other industries.
