ABSTRACT

Scheduling of mine production occurs on both long and short-term scales. Long-term schedules are produced for cashflow analysis and as a guide to more detailed mine design and development. Scheduling software greatly simplifies this procedure by making the process of determining the grade and tonnage within a cut much more rapid and accurate. The canned graph theory based routines that are included with most mine design packages cannot be applied to scheduling. Display of the block model data and mining limits must be kept simple or the immense scale and complexity of production scheduling will become overwhelming. Numeric posting of a few critical production related parameters, such as grade and tonnage, should be displayed in the block. Cell colors and fill patterns, even contour lines, can be used to reduce display complexity. The procedure used to flag blocks available for mining and updating their contents to reflect the progress of mining should be as automated as possible.