Digital Ground Support Verification: Ensuring Compliance through Accurate Mapping

Accurate as-built ground support records are essential for managing underground excavation performance, enabling back-analysis, compliance tracking, and future design refinement. Traditionally, documenting support installations has been a manual and time-consuming process, often prone to gaps and inconsistencies.

With RockMass Eon, geotechnical teams can now capture high-resolution, georeferenced support records systematically and efficiently, delivering new levels of transparency and accuracy to underground ground support documentation.

‍

Industry Challenge

Many underground mines lack comprehensive, up-to-date records of installed ground support. Manual mapping and field logs may miss support elements, misidentify installation locations, or become outdated as conditions evolve. This limits engineers’ ability to:

• Perform forensic analysis after ground movement or support failure
• Calibrate empirical support models
• Track compliance with ground support standards
• Plan rehabilitation or secondary support in a timely and efficient way

The result is reactive and fragmented ground support management, leading to missed opportunities for optimization and risk reduction.

‍

GroundedAI Approach

RockMass Eon offers a rapid, digital solution to generate reliable as-built records. Using LiDAR scanning combined with digital support identification, Eon captures detailed 3D point clouds of excavation surfaces and enables recognition of installed support elements, including bolts, mesh, shotcrete, and cable anchors.

The data is accurately georeferenced and exportable, making it easy to visualize, share, and integrate into geotechnical workflows.

‍

Workflow Example

• Capture high-resolution point cloud data underground
• Digitally identify ground support elements
• Precisely georeference datasets within mine plans
• Integrate data into numerical models for kinematic analysis (DIPS, Unwedge) and stress modeling (RS2, FLAC)
• Archive support records for future reporting or back-analysis

‍

Key Benefits

• Digitally capture the exact location and orientation of installed support systems
• Conduct support audits in minutes
• Georeferenced records help ensure that support is installed to spec
• Compare support performance against monitored deformation or observed failures (back-analysis)
• Compatible with mine planning and asset management systems (Deswik, Vulcan, etc.) for holistic ground control tracking

‍

Ready to simplify ground support verification? Contact GroundedAI for a demo and see how Eon streamlines your geotechnical workflows.

‍