ABSTRACT
The new millennium will bring amazing and powerful tools for the mining engineer. As the last millennium closed, the computer industry was heralding new and improved software hardly imaginable even a few decades ago. These improvements and special software in the last decade of the 20th century have combined to provide the mining engineer with powerful tools for mine design. Mine system simulation was starting to come into its own as the mining engineer was ending the last decade. Some of the new applications of this subject are discussed and how they will impact the way the mining engineer works are shown. These include using the animations of proposed mining operations for “presentation models” as well as using such models for showing non-mining personnel how the mine operates. This latter use may soon be coupled with both WEB-based animation and virtual reality. Examples of both surface and underground mines are considered.
