The existing water services (supply, drainage and de-watering) and ventilation capacity can quickly become inadequate as the mine workings are extended if the mine service networks are not treated as critical aspect of the production process. The opportunity cost of inadequate mine service capacity is often ignored while productivity reduces due to increased delays from poorly designed or located service infrastructure.

To optimise the performance and capital costs of mine infrastructure, 3-dimensional analysis is required to provide meaning results due to the spatial components of service networks. The Chasm Consulting suite of software provides true scale 3-dimensional models that can simulate both existing and planned service networks.

The Mine Network Evaluations and Simulations (MINES) process uses the simulation results from mine water and ventilation models to evaluate their ability to support the planned mining activities. All stages of the network duty cycle (development, production and conduit) can be analysed over the life of mine design and the results used to improve productivity as well as capital budgeting.

The results generated from the MINES process can help deliver benefits such as improved optimisation of capital infrastructure, better matching of capacity to requirement and help with quick cost-benefit analysis of "what-if" questions. The MINES process can simulate the duty at one point in time to demonstrate the networks capacity over a given time period using dynamic simulation.

The design parameters can be easily transferred across the project or operation as a template for less experienced engineers to help simplify future mine planning. This provides the potential for cost saving by "standardising" the mine infrastructure design and components .