Financial Simulation - Selection option won't auto-populate values

[LGreene]

Using the "Quick" option for financial simulations works well for me, but using the "Selection" option does not automatically provide the same results, unless I manually put in all the cost/m values derived from the fixed and variable costs in settings. Is there a step I'm missing to have these columns automatically populated with values derived from the cost settings so that the results match the "Quick" option?

[Florian Michelin]

Hi, 

There is no way to input those values automatically at this stage. The selection option is made to input exact values from the contractor where the settings are approximated. We do not fill it in automatically to avoid using extrapolated values.  The quick option also finds the intermediate sizes where the selection will only recommend the sizes that have been entered.

It is worth mentioning the settings and the column do not represent the same values. 

What is the reason behind using the selection vs the quick method?

Florian

 

[LGreene]

I was just trying to get a deeper look behind the airway recommendations in the quick selections. I wanted to see Ventsim's breakdown of the cost curve for quick selections, and to play with adjusting flows for some shafts using the values in the settings as a starting point. 

Part of the reason I was asking is that it is time consuming to input exact values when looking at lots of different airways, especially when I'm unable to copy/paste a table of exact values and have to do it one cell at a time. Maybe having some kind of costing preset for different contractor values could help make this quicker? I don't know if that is the best way to go, but I thought any feature that automatically fills in some values might speed my workflow up. Right now I'm mostly using Ventsim for trade-off studies. 

I'm not sure if these forums are the best place to recommend new features, but it would also be nice to see  an option when doing a global financial simulation to have a default mine life for all airways, and to also have the mine life of airways linked to either the staging dates or the age entry/exit dates. For long mine lifes, I can get some very different recommended values from top to bottom. 

[Florian Michelin]

Sure, yes it is a bit annoying. I made myself a spreadsheet to convert the setting values to the values from the table but not being able to copy paste is an issue. We will look into adding a button there to automatically input the values from the preset.

Yes that is a good idea, we could possibly also look at adjusting airflow for the different stages of the shaft life. Once again we will look at improving the optimiser in the future.

Florian