On Friday, March 29th, 2020, the master's student in Mining at the Delphos Laboratory, Sergio Montané, passed his grade exam, defending his thesis titled "Methodology of design and optimal semi-automatic sequencing of ramps in underground mining." His evaluating commission consisted of Nelson Morales, Ernesto Arancibia, Jorge Amaya, and Edison Ramírez.

His work consisted of creating an assistive methodology for the design of ramps in underground mining. For this purpose, Sergio incorporated a model that allows the generation of ramp designs, with the UDESS program developed in Delphos so, through an iterative process, an optimized design of ramps and crossovers of access to productive sectors and the plans of construction and operation of the mine is obtained, to maximize the profit that the project can achieve.

The methodology was implemented in a case study, improving designs in both operational terms and better economic evaluators. It was possible to improve the project's NPV with the new design, which remains operational and contemplates appropriate times for its construction and entry into production. On the other hand, the flexibility of the proposed methodology was shown when evaluating new solutions considering modifying the objective function and minimizing the total costs associated with the design.

The methodology turns out to be an effective tool to assist in developing access design tasks, allowing to reduce the required time and the possibility of generating more than one design to choose the design that best meets the project's objectives.

Congratulations to the new Master in Mining!