Development of a Software for Capital Cost Estimation of Open Pit Mine Equipments

Pre-feasibility and feasibility studies are vital in mining projects. One major part of these studies is capital cost estimation of project, especially the cost related to equipments. Due to possibility of several technical alternatives, estimation of costs should be fulfilled separately for each alternative. For this reason, suitable models or softwares may be useful to do these studies in shortest possible time with sufficient accuracy. In this study, after a brief comparison of the cost estimation models a software has been developed for estimating the capital costs of equipments in open pit mines. Basically, this software is designed using western mining engineering institute cost models. Visual basic programming language is applied for development the software which can be run in the windows- XP, 2000, 98 and NT environment.Application of this software to some of the metal mines has shown that the results of cost estimation obtained from this software are credible and this software has a good conformity with run conditions.