Plans

What a pit will produce next period, read from the survey and the block model, and published where the dashboards already judge it.

Mining → Plans

Two questions

Every plan asks one of them of each period:

Mode	The question	What it answers with
To a product target	We need this much product. What has to move?	The benches, the waste before the ore, the metres and blasted tonnes, and any capacity that cannot deliver them.
To capacity	We can move this much. What does that buy?	The product, and the process that stopped the walk.
To the best order	Given the whole horizon, what order gets the most out of an objective?	Every period planned together — see Optimising the schedule, below.

The first two walk the pit top-down, bench by bench, the last bench of a period pro rata — an answer a planner can check by hand, period by period. The third plans every period at once instead of walking them in turn.

Not an optimiser, except where you ask it to be

Target and capacity mode never move a pit wall and never reorder benches for value — the pit optimiser under Block models decides what is worth mining; these two decide what next period costs. Optimise mode is the schedule optimiser itself, choosing an order across the periods you already gave it, over the shape you already gave it. It still never moves a pit wall.

Sources

Field	What to choose
Pit	The pit being planned. Its surveys, models, designs and boundaries fill the pickers below.
Ground, Ground as of	The surveyed ground, and the date it is read as of. A running surface is read as it stood on that date. Everything mined before the date is above the surface and drops out on its own.
Block model	The deposit in blocks. Its grade attribute decides ore and product.
Shape	A pit design: the design's benches, each daylighting where its crest reaches the ground. Slices of a boundary: a column from the highest ground inside the outline down to a floor level, in benches of the height you give — which starts at the pit's planned bench height where the pit has one (set on a blast). No batter, no berm: a first answer, not a design.
Grade field, Grade unit	Which attribute is the grade and what one unit of it means per tonne: g/t makes grams, cpht makes carats at 0.01 per tonne, percent is read as kilograms, or name the product and its factor.
Ore is decided by	A cut-off grade, or an ore-fraction field (what flagging a model against an orebody solid writes).
Recovery	Product is in situ × recovery, not plant output.
Density	One figure, or a model attribute.
Unestimated blocks are	Waste, the rock still moves, or excluded. A block with no grade is never ore.
Swell factor	Loose cubic metres each bank cubic metre of the pit's rock becomes once blasted and tipped — about 1.3 for blasted waste. It is what turns waste tonnes into the volume the dumps must hold; blank leaves the waste out of the dump balance.

Block height and bench height

The model's block height should divide the bench height, or each bench's reserve borrows from the one below. The result says so; it does not refuse.

Drill and blast from the pattern

Typed, the drill and explosives processes charge every bench the same: a metre per 50 t, 0.27 kg a tonne. Switch on Design from the pattern on the Drill and blast card and every bench is given a blast pattern of its own, laid on its floor against the ground as it stands — so a hard bench, a high bench or one with a ragged floor drills and loads what it really needs. Each drill and explosives process is then charged at that bench's own metres and kilograms per tonne, on the rock it reads, in every mode — the optimiser included, so a drill capacity binds on the benches that truly need the metres.

The card takes the hole diameter, the product, the rock density, the rule the burden comes from (see Drill and blast) and the largest blast. After a compute it lists each bench's pattern — holes, burden × spacing, tonnes per metre drilled and kilograms a tonne — and Draft this period's blasts files the period's blasts under Blasts, cut from each bench's share and ready to adjust and approve. The figure Explosives publishes like any other.

Processes, and where a capacity comes from

A process is anything the pit runs that is linear in ore and waste tonnes. A new plan starts with nine, in the order the ground is worked: Pre-stripping (clearing virgin ground — trees, levelling), Topsoil removal (to the topsoil dump, for rehabilitating the rock dumps later, whether by load-and-haul, by dozer or both), Waste drilling, Waste blasting, Waste haulage (to the waste dumps), Ore drilling, Ore blasting, Ore haulage (to the plant or a stockpile) and Explosives — kilograms on both rocks, less any free-dig, starting at 0.27 kg a tonne. Add process adds any other. Pre-stripping and topsoil removal start with no demand: the plan reads ore and waste tonnes, so type what a tonne of waste asks of each — the share of the stripping that is topsoil, say — or switch them off once the ground is cleared. Each drill card says which rock it Drills — waste, ore or both — so the two drills read their own tonnes, and the plan's drilled and blasted figures are the pairs added together.

Every card folds to one line on its chevron, and folds by itself when its process is switched off — a switched-off process places no demand and never binds, which is how a mine that does not blast, or does not drill, plans without them. Switching a process on opens its card again.

This device remembers how you left things. A card you folded opens folded next time, on any plan; a preset you switched off comes up switched off on the next new plan, and a new plan opens in the grade unit you chose last, with its product name and factor. A saved plan keeps its own switches and its own unit. The memory is this device's alone — another computer, or a cleared browser, starts from the presets.

Capacity from is the planner's choice, process by process:

Capacity from	You give it
Declared, one figure	The figure. A million tonnes a month.
Built up from equipment	Units with a count and a rate per hour, optionally the Machine each one is, plus shifts per day, hours per shift, availability and utilisation. Capacity is the combined rate × hours per shift × shifts per day × the period's calendar days × availability × utilisation. Add from a fleet offers only fleets marked as Equipment (a Tracker Group ticked Equipment when it was created), and a unit that names a machine must name one in such a fleet. Where the account holds the Maintenance module, Read availability from maintenance replaces the typed availability with what was measured for the machines named on the build-up, over the same length of time before the plan starts; a unit that names no machine is left out, and where nothing was recorded the typed figure stands.
Demonstrated by a parameter	A monitored parameter that already records what the process does, a look-back in periods, and the mean, the best period or the 80th percentile. Fetch actuals shows the series first.
Declared, varying by period	Tick Varies by period on a declared capacity and type a figure per period, or paste a column from a spreadsheet. A period left blank takes the single figure. Three trucks in March, five from April.
From a truck cycle	The trucks — a class with a count, a payload and its speed against total resistance, loaded and empty — the haul route as segments of length and grade, the loading and dumping time, and the shifts. Capacity is what those trucks can carry round that cycle in the period. See Haulage from the road.

What keeps a plan honest

A fleet build-up that promises double what the same fleet demonstrated last quarter is visible as such. Switch the process between the two sources and watch the walk stop in a different place.

Haulage from the road

A haulage process costed from a truck cycle works its capacity out the way a haulage engineer does, rather than taking a tonnes-a-month figure on trust:

• The trucks. Pick a class from the presets — a 40 t articulated, a 90 t, 140 t or 220 t rigid — or type one: payload, and speed in km/h at each total resistance, loaded and empty. Total resistance is grade plus rolling resistance, so a 10 % ramp on a 3 % road reads at 13 % loaded going up and −7 % coming down. Several classes may share a cycle; each contributes its own trips.
• The route. Segments of length and grade, with a rolling resistance per segment or one for the road. Read from a road design fills the segments from a filed haul road or ramp, and Driven out of the pit flips the grades so the loaded leg climbs.
• Fixed time loading and dumping, and the shifts, hours, availability and utilisation a fleet build-up already takes.

The card previews the cycle — A cycle of 24.6 minutes: 6.1 loaded, 4.3 empty, 4 fixed; 3,660 t per truck-shift — and the capacity follows. The result then reports, per period, the trips, the truck hours and, where the class states litres an hour, the diesel and the CO₂ that moving the period's rock costs. Truck hours and diesel can be published as figures of their own.

A fleet build-up says what the fleet could do; a truck cycle says what the road lets it do

The same ten trucks give a different capacity on a 2 km flat haul and a 5 km ramp at 10 %. Where the haul is going to lengthen as the pit deepens, cost the haulage from the road and vary the fleet by period.

Mode and horizon

A cadence from daily to annual, a start date, and up to 24 consecutive periods. Each period continues where the last stopped, with every capacity refilled. The screen says how many calendar days the first period has, because that is what a fleet build-up is multiplied by.

A schedule decided elsewhere

The fourth mode is Imported. The schedule was decided in another package — Deswik NOVA, MineSched, a consultant's spreadsheet — and this plan reads it, against its own reserve, and publishes it here.

1. Compute the plan once, in any mode, so it has a reserve: one unit per bench, or per stage's cut through a bench, per pit. Send that reserve away — Reserve as CSV under Export — or let the scheduler build its own from the same model and design.
2. Import a schedule (under Import) reads the file the scheduler produced: one row per unit per period, with the fraction taken or the tonnes. The dialog shows how many rows matched the reserve, which did not and why, and what the file gives — fractions, tonnes or both. Note where it came from.
3. Take it. The plan's mode becomes Imported, the takes are its pins, and Compute runs at once: every period's tonnes, grade, product, demands, truck hours, feed qualities and dump balance are read off exactly the fractions the file said. No target, no capacity walk, no optimiser — the file decided, and the plan reports what deciding that costs.

Capacities are still judged and an exceeded one is still red; a bench taken after the one below it is reported as the imported order runs against the pit's own and kept as imported; a row asking for more of a unit than is left takes what is left and says so. Switching the mode away drops the takes.

Where the file came from stays on the plan

The file's name, when it was read and how many rows it held are kept with the plan and shown beside its mode, and a schedule filed through the exchange API says which token filed it.

Optimising the schedule

To the best order plans every period together rather than walking them one at a time. It is free to choose how much of the horizon each period takes — not necessarily top bench first in every one — whichever gets the most out of the objective below.

Free to hold a period back

Target and capacity mode ask a fixed question of every period in turn. The optimiser instead holds the whole horizon in mind at once, and is free to leave a period short of the target if that gives a better order overall — unless Must reach the target each period, below, says otherwise.

Optimise for	What it is	Pick it when
Product	The most product over the whole horizon.	The plain question: most metal, carats or product, full stop.
Value	The most money, at the economics below, summed over the horizon.	Not every tonne of product is worth the same.
Net present value	The most money, weighted toward sooner.	The timing of the cash matters as much as the total.

Value and net present value both need price per unit of product, mining cost per tonne (ore and waste alike), processing cost per ore tonne, and an optional selling cost per unit. Net present value also needs a discount rate — an annual rate, converted to the plan's own cadence at Compute. There is no default: it is a business decision, and Compute is refused without one.

Must reach the target each period

Off, the optimiser may mine nothing in a period if that is the better order. On, every period must reach the target beside the toggle, or the optimiser reports why it cannot and the capacity schedule runs instead. The toggle is saved with the plan, on or off, so reopening it later shows the same choice you left it on.

The result adds an objective value — what was maximised, over the whole horizon, in whatever the objective is stated in — and, behind a details toggle, shadow prices: what one more unit of a process's capacity, in a given period, would have been worth. Both are kept with the result, so reopening an optimised plan shows them again.

Several pits, one plant

A mine with two pits in different states, one still stripping and one in production, and one plant, asks a question a single-pit plan cannot: which pit to attack, for how much, and for how long, to get the most out of the plant. A plan to the best order can hold more than one pit.

Under the first pit's sources, Other pits lists the rest. Add pit opens a card with the same fields as the first pit: item, ground and the date it is read as of, block model, shape, grade, ore rule, density and recovery. Every pit produces the plan's product; a pit may be estimated in a different grade unit, but what it makes is what the first pit makes. An item already on the plan is not offered again.

Each process then gains Applies to. Every pit is a shared capacity: the plant, or a fleet that moves between pits. One pit only is that pit's own, such as its excavator; other pits' rock places no demand on it. The optimiser reads each pit's reserve in its own frame, with its own stages, and schedules them together. Nothing forces one pit to wait for another; the shared capacities are what tie them, and what let the optimiser choose between them.

The result names the pit on every bench, adds a By pit table beside the totals, and carries the split into every export. Publish offers each figure twice over: the plan total, and each pit's own share, offered that pit's own group's parameters, so each pit's dashboard carries its own target.

Only to the best order

A target or capacity plan takes one pit. Those walks take the top bench first through one list, and would finish the first pit before touching the next. Switching a multi-pit plan to either mode says so, and the plan will not save until the mode is switched back or the other pits removed.

Blending, opening a pit, and the longer haul

Three more things the Objective card and a shared process take:

• Feed grade band. The ore fed to the plant in every period must average inside it, measured as recovered product per ore tonne so it reads the same across pits estimated in different grade units. Leave either end blank. The capacity schedule keeps the band as well, so the band alone can never leave the optimiser without an answer; only a band together with a target it cannot reach can, and the result then says so.
• Cost of opening each pit. For a value or net present value objective: a one-off cost charged if the schedule mines anything at all from the pit, the box cut and the haul road. The optimiser then decides whether each pit is worth opening within this horizon, and the result says which pits it opened and which it left closed. Charged undiscounted. On a single-pit plan it answers whether the pit is worth touching at all.
• Haul factor by pit. On a process that serves every pit, how much more of it a tonne from each further pit demands than a tonne from the first — 1.4 for a haul forty percent longer. Leave at 1 where the pits are alike.

The plant's minimum, the stockpile, free-dig and stage openings

• Minimum plant feed. The least ore the plant must be fed in every period, in tonnes — a floor in tonnes rather than in product. Blank asks nothing. A minimum the reserve cannot feed is reported, and the capacity schedule runs instead.
• A stockpile. Turn on There is a stockpile between the pits and the plant and say what is on it at the start, its grade in product per ore tonne, what reclaiming a tonne costs, and the most it may hold. Then mark the plant, under Processes, as Fed from the stockpile: its demand is read on ore fed — what was mined, less what went on the pile, plus what came off it. The optimiser may dig ahead in a good month and feed the pile in a lean one. Everything that crosses the pile is taken at the grade you declared, so the arithmetic stays exact; the result shows what went on, what came off, what is left, and what the plant was actually fed. With a stockpile the publish dialog offers Ore fed, Product fed, Stockpiled and Reclaimed as figures of their own.
• Free-dig. Under Sources, name a Free-dig attribute of the block model — any value above zero means the block needs no blasting — then mark the blast, and the drilling before it, as Skips free-dig rock under Processes. Those tonnes are still mined and moved; they simply place no demand on the processes that skip them.
• Cost of opening each stage. Where a pit's design carries stages, each stage can carry its own opening cost beside the pit's, on a value or net present value objective. Pits and stages together may carry twelve.
• A fleet that has changed. A demonstrated capacity reads what the fleet was. Fleet since then multiplies the look-back — 1.2 for six trucks where it ran five. Where the fleet has changed a great deal, a build-up from equipment is the honest choice.

Qualities, blending and several piles

A plant is rarely bound by one grade alone. Under Sources, Qualities names up to eight more attributes of the block model the plan should carry — sulphur, silica, iron, moisture — each read into the reserve as a tonnes-weighted mean over the unit's ore. Then:

• Feed quality bands. Beside the feed grade band, each quality can carry a minimum and a maximum the plant will accept, averaged over what it is fed in the period. To the best order the bands bind, and the optimiser blends the pits, the piles and the periods to hold them; on the walks and on an imported schedule a band is judged and a breach reported — Sulphur of the feed averages 2.1, above the band's 1.5.
• A recovery curve. Recovery need not be one figure. Type it against grade — 0.5 at 0.5 g/t, 0.85 at 1.5 g/t, 0.92 at 3 g/t — and every block's product is taken at the recovery its own grade reads off the curve, so a low-grade bench yields what it will yield rather than what the average says.
• Several stockpiles. Tick Several piles and up to six piles are listed, each with its own grade, its qualities, what is on it, what it may hold, and the grade band it accepts — a high-grade pile and a marginal pile. Rock off a bench may go onto any pile whose band accepts its grade; the optimiser decides which, and when to reclaim from which, and the result shows every pile's movements. The publish dialog offers each pile's stockpiled and reclaimed tonnes.

Compute, and the result

Compute saves the plan, loads the sources, reads the reserve bench by bench and schedules the horizon, in the background. The result, per period:

• The benches taken, with the fraction of each, blocks, air, unestimated, ore and waste tonnes, grade and product, and a total row.
• Each enabled process's demand against its capacity and where the capacity came from, the binding one marked, any exceeded one in red.
• The stripping ratio, the ground-as-of date, and the warnings.
• On a haulage process costed from a truck cycle: the trips, the truck hours, the diesel and the CO₂, and the cycle time it was worked at.
• Where the plan carries qualities: what the feed averaged on each, against its band.
• On a plan to the best order: the objective value over the horizon, which pits and stages were opened, and what an extra unit of each capacity would have been worth this period. These are kept with the result, so reopening the plan shows them; a result without them says so until it is computed again.

Pinning a fraction by hand. On a computed plan to the best order, each bench row has a Pin column. Type a fraction, 0 to 1, to fix how much of that bench the period takes, then press Compute again: the optimiser solves around what you pinned and the result says so — the best schedule around it, not the best schedule. A pin no schedule can honour is reported, and the capacity schedule runs instead. Clear every pin takes them all out.

The export bar on the card takes the whole horizon into a document.

A fraction of a uniform bench

The last bench of a period is taken pro rata as if it were uniform. Where the bench is waste on one side and ore on the other, the split is an estimate by exactly that much.

Underground: stopes and headings

A third shape, beside a pit design and slices of a boundary: stopes and headings. Choose it and the plan stops being about benches altogether.

Where the stopes come from

Open pit asks how far down it pays to dig, and the answer is one shell. Underground asks which pieces of the orebody are worth the drives that reach them, and the answer is a set of separate stopes with the rock between them left standing. The plan works that out from a frame — what shape a stope is allowed to be — and the economics of mining one:

Field	What it is
Sublevel interval	How tall one stope is: the distance between sublevels, and what a longhole rig drills in one go
Panel length	How long one stope is along strike
Narrowest, Widest stope	What the equipment can mine and what the ground will stand, across strike
Wall slough (ELOS)	How far each wall sloughs in, metres. That rock is barren and still gets hauled and treated
Slough grade	The grade of the sloughed rock. Blank is barren
Mining recovery	The fraction of a designed stope actually recovered — pillars, drawpoint losses
Product price, Mining cost, Treating cost	What decides how far across strike each stope is taken

The level height and the panel length are the method. The width is the variable one, and choosing it is the optimisation: for every panel, the plan takes the run of rock across strike worth the most, between the narrowest and widest allowed. Every admissible width is examined, so no better one exists.

Everything mucked from a stope is fed

Nothing is sorted underground. The waste caught between the ore goes to the mill with it, which is exactly why the width is a decision and not a formality — and why a minimum width forced on a narrow orebody shows up as a lower grade rather than as more metal.

The headings that reach them

Under The development that reaches them, tick the underground headings designed for this item, in the order they are driven. Each follows the one before it, and every stope follows the last of them, so a level is reached before it is mined. A heading is a unit of the plan like a stope: it breaks rock that has to be hauled, it consumes the same capacities, and on an ore drive it produces as well.

What the order guarantees, and what it does not

By the end of any period, no more of a stope has been taken than of the development that reaches it. That is guaranteed. What it does not say is that the drive must be finished first — two thirds of a decline permits two thirds of the stope below it, because the schedule is solved in fractions. Over a long decline across a monthly horizon that reads sensibly. Where it must be all-or-nothing, pin the heading to the period it is driven in, and every stope behind it is held at zero until that period is done.

The order the sublevels are worked is bottom-up by default, so a stope is filled before the one above it is taken and the fill becomes the next floor. Top-down and any-order are there for the ground and the method that call for them. Stopes are stacked by panel, so only stopes in the same panel wait for each other.

To the best order, or imported

An underground plan cannot be walked to a target or to capacity. Those walks take benches top-down, and underground has no top-down: a stope waits on the heading that reaches it, not on the ground above it. The plan says so rather than producing a schedule that mines a level nobody has reached.

Each heading drilled and loaded as its round is

A heading is not drilled at the pit's metre per 50 t. Where a development round has been designed for it in Underground, the plan charges the heading's drill and explosives processes at that round's own drilled metres and kilograms per tonne — its holes, its relief holes, its pull and its face. Stopes are charged at their rings; see Each stope charged at its rings.

A heading can have several rounds. The plan takes an approved round (or one drilled, charged or fired since) before one not yet approved. Of the approved rounds it takes the one approved last, and of the rest the one filed last. A save or a firing does not count, so a new round supersedes the last one without your retiring it, even where the old one was fired last night. A retired round is never taken, and the rounds are read afresh on every compute.

After a compute the Drill and blast card lists each heading, its round, the round's status, and the metres drilled and kilograms of explosive it is charged per plan tonne. A round's figures are worked per tonne of its own rock. Where the round weighs that rock at a different density from the plan, they are scaled to the plan's tonnes: the card shows them as charged and says by how much, and the first period's notes say so too, one note for each pair of densities.

A heading keeps the typed rates, and the card and the first period's notes name it, when:

• no round is designed for it;
• its round drills and charges nothing;
• no round was found for it among the rounds read. A plan reads up to 2,000 rounds per mine, in the register's order of planned date and then filing date, so rounds with no planned date go unread first. Where a mine has more, the card says how many of how many were read. Retire rounds no longer driven.

Each stope charged at its rings

A saved plan reads the rings drafted from it that are still to fire — designed, awaiting approval, approved, drilled or charged — chosen as a heading's round is: approved before not, then approved or filed last, never retired. Rings already fired or reconciled are spent: their drilling and explosives are never charged again, and the first period's notes count them — ring blasts, and the rings they held — and name their stopes in one note. A stope is often fired a few rings at a time: once a set has been fired, the next rings for the stope are drafted from the plan and charged in their turn. A stope whose rings have all been fired is charged nothing more, not the typed rates. A stope's rings are fired once and break the whole stope, so the stope is charged all the drilled metres and kilograms of its rings still to fire. Each period is charged those totals times the share of the stope it mines. The share is by tonnes, which is the same as the share of the stope's rock in situ, because a stope's recovery and dilution are its own throughout. The card's metres and kilograms per tonne for a stope are derived only: those totals over the tonnes the plan mines from the stope, recovered and with its dilution. No density scales a stope's charge.

Rings are found by the stope's name. Where they break more than 5% more or less rock than the stope holds in situ, the first period's notes say so, and the Drill and blast card lists each stope with both figures: the stope may have been laid out again since, or the rings do not cover it. A stope holds its drives' rock too, so the rings are weighed with their drives added back. Volumes are compared where both are known — the stope's floor area times its height — otherwise tonnes. Rings with no figure for the rock they break, and stopes whose rings have all been fired, are not weighed.

A stope with no rings keeps the typed rates, and the first period's notes name it. A plan reads up to 2,000 ring blasts drafted from it per mine, and says so where there are more.

A plan with no drill or explosives process still reads its rounds and rings, so each period says what it fires. It charges nothing from them and names nothing as charged.

What each period fires

After a compute, Planned to fire in the selected period lists each heading and stope the selected period mines:

• a heading's round is fired again and again, so the period's Firings are its tonnes over one round's tonnes;
• a stope's rings are fired once, so the period fires its share of the stope's tonnes. Where the plan's horizon mines the whole stope, the shares over the plan come to the whole; a horizon that ends before the stope is finished charges only the share it mines.

Drilling and Explosives are what the period is charged from them, with a total row. The Result card's export carries the table for every period; its total adds the rounded figures shown.

A stope with rings still to fire has Open the rings, even where they drill and charge nothing yet. A stope with none has Design rings, which opens the ring designer on the stope as the plan laid it out (see Designing a stope's rings). Rings are drafted from the plan's first mine only.

Everything else in this page then applies unchanged — capacities, blending bands, stockpiles, haulage from the road, the dump balance and publishing — because the units are units.

A thin seam: panels and strips

A chromitite seam on the Great Dyke is a sheet, not a lump: 25 to 30 cm thick, coming to surface along strike and dipping gently into the ground. A block model cannot see it, a pit designed from a flat floor does not fit it, and a stope laid out across strike between sublevels is nearly all waste. So a seam is modelled on its own — see Modelling a seam — and planned with one of two shapes of its own:

• Seam panels — the seam mined underground, in panels between levels, reached by inclines;
• Seam strips from the outcrop — the seam mined from where it comes to surface, strip by strip down dip, until a strip stops paying for its waste.

Choose either and the plan names a Seam instead of a block model. The grade field, the ore rule, the density rule, free-dig, qualities and the recovery curve all read a block model, so they go; the seam carries its own floor, thickness, grade and density. The Grade unit and Recovery stay: a chromitite graded in percent makes tonnes of oxide at 0.01 per tonne.

Seam panels

Field	What it is
Panel length	How long one panel is along strike, metres
Level interval	The vertical distance between levels. Panels lie between two; at 15° a 10 m interval is about 39 m of seam down dip
Stoping height	The least height broken square to the seam — what people and machines work in. Where the seam is thinner the rest is wall rock, fed with it
Extraction	The share of a panel mined; the rest stands as pillars. Square 6 m pillars at 12 m centres leave a quarter, so 0.75
Mining recovery	Of what is broken, the share that reaches the plant
Wall rock grade	The grade of the rock broken with the seam. Blank is barren
Crown pillar	Rock left over the seam near surface, metres. Where the seam is also stripped from its outcrop, set it to the open cut's depth
Strike bearing	The bearing panels are measured along. Blank is the seam's own strike
Product price, Mining cost, Treating cost, Wall rock density	What decides which panels are worth mining

On a thin seam, the stoping height is the grade

A 0.3 m seam at 40 % stoped at 1 m sends 0.7 m of barren wall rock to the mill with it, and the mill sees about 15.5 %. That is the price of a thin seam, not a fault in the layout — and it is why the stoping height decides more of the plan than any other figure on this card.

Tick The inclines that reach them in the order they are driven; each follows the one before it, and every panel follows the last. The order the levels are worked is top-down by default. A panel plan is planned to the best order, or imported — like stopes, panels wait on their access, not on the ground above them, and the plan refuses the target and capacity walks.

Seam strips from the outcrop

Field	What it is
Strip width	How wide one strip is down dip, in plan. Strips are counted from where the seam leaves the ground in each cut
Cut length	How long one cut is along strike — the unit the schedule takes
Least digging thickness	The least height a bucket digs square to the seam. On a 25 cm seam it still takes this much, and the floor rock beyond the seam is fed with it
Seam left behind	Seam lost when it is exposed, as a thickness
Floor dug with it	Floor rock that comes with the seam however carefully it is dug
Floor rock grade	The grade of that floor rock. Blank is barren
Most strip ratio	The most waste a strip may carry for every tonne it feeds. Blank: a strip is taken while it pays
Final highwall	The angle the last strip's wall is left at. Default 70°
Strike bearing, Product price, Mining cost, Treating cost, Overburden density	As for panels
Cast the overburden into the strip before	Each strip's overburden goes into the void beside it and asks nothing of the dumps. The first strip of each cut — the box cut — still goes to the dump

Down each cut the strips are taken while each one pays for its own overburden and for the extra highwall it adds — moving the limit a strip deeper moves the final wall deeper — and the first that does not ends the cut. The wedge behind the final wall is stripped with the last strip.

Strips walk top-down, and that is down dip

A strip plan can be walked to a target or to capacity: the walk takes the shallowest strips first, which is the order they are dug in wherever the seam keeps dipping the one way. Where it rolls back up, the first period's notes name the strips the walk would take early — plan it to the best order, which keeps every strip behind the one up dip of it.

Both need the Ground: strips take their overburden from it, and panels their crown pillar. Where the ground cuts through the seam at the outcrop, only the seam below it is counted; the weathering near surface is not.

Waste dumps, and whether the waste fits

Waste has to go somewhere, and a plan that moves a million tonnes of it a month should say where, and whether there is room. The Waste dumps card lists the dumps the plan tips into, in tipping order — the first fills first, then the next — and for each:

Field	What to choose
Dump	The dump item. A survey is of a piece of ground, so a dump is an item like a pit, in a group labelled for surveys.
Design	The dump's dump design, whose lifts say what it holds.
Already in it	A figure, typed — placed cubic metres in the dump when the horizon opens; or Measured off a survey — a survey of the dump as it stands, read as of a date: what it holds is what the survey stands above the ground the design was drawn on, inside the footprint.
Compaction	Placed cubic metres each loose cubic metre tipped settles to. 1 keeps the loose volume; 0.9 says a tenth settles out.
Runoff coefficient, Toe pond	For water: the fraction of rain the dump sheds, and the pond it drains to.

Compute designs each dump against the ground its design names, measures what it holds, turns every period's waste tonnes into loose cubic metres through the pit's swell factor and density, and tips them into the dumps in order. The result shows, per period, the loose waste, what each dump took, what is in it at the end and the space left — and a full mark on the period a dump fills.

How the dumps enter the schedule depends on the mode:

• To capacity: the dumps' space is a capacity like any other, and it binds — the walk stops when the dumps are full, and Waste dump space is named as what stopped it.
• To a product target: the target is taken anyway, and the period whose waste has nowhere to go says so, in red, with the volume.
• To the best order: the space is one limit over the whole horizon, and the optimiser will not plan more waste than the dumps hold. What an extra cubic metre of dump space would have been worth over the horizon is on the result beside the other shadow prices.

The space is a stock, not a rate: what one period uses of it, the next does not have. The demand table shows the space left over the horizon under the Waste dump space row. A plan with a swell factor and no dump still reports its waste as loose cubic metres; it just cannot say whether it fits.

A footprint over the pit

A dump whose footprint overlaps the pit's crest sits on ground the pit will take. The result says so, with the shared area; the plan does not stop.

A dump's capacity is the workable one

Where a dump design carries a least top width, the plan reads it too: the space a plan believes it has is the space the design actually leaves. A dump that stands two lifts short because nothing could tip on the third holds two lifts' worth, here as well as on the design. See A dump has to be worked.

Water: rain and groundwater

Rain is the constraint an open pit never plans around until the wet season closes the bottom benches for a month; groundwater is the one that never stops, wet season or dry. Switch Plan for water on and the plan reads what each period's rain and groundwater do, in its own words, before the period arrives.

Field	What to give it
Mean rainfall by month	Twelve depths, mm, from the site's records. A period takes each month's figure pro rata by the days it covers.
Design storm	The depth and the hours of the storm the pit is designed for — the 1-in-10-year 24-hour depth, say — and the return period as a label. Zero tests no storm.
Dumps shed	The fraction of rain a dump sheds where its own row names none, about 0.5 for loose rock.
Dewatering, one block per pit	The pit's runoff coefficient (about 0.9 for bare rock and haul roads — the catchment is the design's opening, its top crest), any outside catchment that drains into the pit once the diversion drains have taken their share and its own coefficient, the sump, the pumping rate of all the pumps together, their hours a day and availability.
Groundwater, on the same block	A steady inflow in cubic metres an hour — seepage and springs as the hydrogeology report gives them — and, where the pit goes below the water table, the water table as a level with a rate per metre below it. Every period reads how far the floor it has reached sits below the table and takes that many metres' worth. Leave all three blank for a pit above the table.

The sump and the drain come from the design

Leave the sump blank and the plan reads the sump the pit's design carries; leave the outside catchment blank and it reads the strip inside the design's diversion drain. The placeholder under each field says which it will use. A typed figure always wins, and a sump typed as zero means none.

Per period, per catchment, the result shows:

• the runoff — rainfall × area × coefficient — and the groundwater the period took, all day, rain or no rain, against what the pumps clear in the period's days, and the pumping hours the two together take. A period whose inflow outruns the pumps is marked in red, and the warning says by how much: water stays on the floor unless pumping is added or the low benches wait for a drier period. Groundwater with no pumps to move it is marked the same way, because it is a pit filling up;
• the storm inflow, with the groundwater that keeps coming while the storm falls, against the sump and what the pumps move meanwhile, the excess, and — over the floor of the lowest bench the period has reached — how deep it floods, with the hours of pumping to clear it;
• for each dump, its runoff and the storm against its toe pond.

Water never stops a plan. It is worked around by pumping, by the sump, or by mining the low benches in a drier month; the plan's job is to name the month and the figure. Evaporation is ignored, which makes every figure conservative; the groundwater is what you typed, so a pit whose inflow was never measured reads as dry below the table until somebody measures it.

Publishing

Publish lists the plan's figures, ore, waste, total rock, product, drilled, blasted and any custom process — and, where the plan carries them, the waste as loose cubic metres, what was tipped on each dump, the rain into the pit and the pumping hours — and against each a Publish onto picker: the monitored parameter that figure becomes the plan for. One period plan is written per figure per period. A parameter takes one figure; leave a figure as Not published to write nothing.

From then on nothing on the dashboard says mine plan. The published figure becomes the Plan the dial, the variance and the status use for that period, and the period summary over a form's submissions judges the filed readings against it. A published plan is locked; Unpublish withdraws its period plans and makes it editable again, and Re-plan keeps the periods already worked and plans the rest afresh, as the next section describes. Where the pit's group has an approval chain, Publish waits for it first — see Approval before publishing.

Figures left part-written

Publishing marks the plan published, then writes a figure for every period; unpublishing marks it and then takes them off. If the server stops part-way, the plan reads as published with some periods missing a figure — and the mine reads a missing figure as zero tonnes planned. The plan cannot say which of the two stopped, so it says what is true of both: the plan's page shows This plan's figures were left part-written on its parameters in red, and the Plans register shows Publish cut short in the Status column (it can be filtered on). Unpublish the plan, then publish it again: unpublishing takes off whatever figures are there, publishing again writes them all. Re-plan is not offered until then. For up to half a minute, while a sound publish may still be writing, the plan reads Publishing instead, and both the plan's page and the register look again by themselves once that is up.

Publishing onto a parameter that already carries a plan period over the same days is refused, naming the parameter.

A dashboard already open on the pit's parameters picks the new plan up on its own, the way it does a broadcast; nobody has to refresh to see the figures move.

Scenarios

New scenario (under Plan) makes a draft copy of the plan, kept beside it rather than in the register at large: the same sources, processes and horizon, ready for one thing to be changed — a second excavator, a lower cut-off, the schedule the consultant sent. The register names the plan each scenario is a scenario of.

Compare scenarios (under View) lays the original and every scenario of it side by side: each figure summed over the horizon, then period by period, with a dash where a scenario has not been computed. The comparison leaves as a document like any other. A scenario is a plan in every other respect — it computes, it exports, it can be published — so the one that wins is simply the one that is published.

Re-planning part-way through

A plan is computed from the ground as it stood on one date. Two months into a twelve-month plan the pit has not gone the way the plan said, and the ten months left need planning again. The months already worked, though, were judged against the plan as it was, and unpublishing the whole plan to replace its tail would take that record with it.

Re-plan on a published plan opens a new plan over the rest of the horizon. It asks for:

• From: one of this plan's own period boundaries, the first on or after today offered by default. A period is never split, because a period cannot be half history.
• Periods: how many the new plan runs, offered as what this plan has left.
• Name: offered as this plan's name with the day appended.

The new plan opens as a draft with everything copied, reading the ground as of the day it starts, and named as the re-plan of this one. Move its as-of date to the latest pickup, adjust what has changed, compute, and publish. Benches the pit has actually taken are gone from the reserve, whether or not the old plan expected them, and benches it has not taken are still there.

Publishing the new plan is where the old one changes:

• its periods from the new plan's first day on are removed, and the new plan's take their place;
• its earlier periods stay exactly as they were published, as history;
• it is marked Closed: it can be read, exported and reconciled, but not edited, published or unpublished. Deleting it removes what it still holds.

Unpublishing the new plan afterwards removes only its own periods. The old plan stays closed, because the periods that were cut are gone. The dialog says so before you commit.

The budget against the latest plan

A twelve-month budget re-planned every month is twelve plans, each closed by the next, and each plan's page shows only its own periods. The chain action, on any plan that has been re-planned or is a re-plan, shows the whole chain as one thing.

Every plan in the chain is named across the top, oldest first, the closed ones greyed. Below, Over the horizon gives each figure three ways, summed over every period any plan in the chain covers: what the budget said, what the latest plan says, and what was filed, with latest-less-budget and filed-less-latest. Period by period gives the same for each period, naming the plan the latest figure came from. The budget is the first plan of the chain; the latest is the last plan to have planned that period; the filed figure is what was recorded on the parameter that plan published the figure onto. A period past the budget's end has no budget figure.

Nothing here is stored; it is read from the plans and the readings each time, and the export bar takes it away.

Reconciling

Reconcile on a published or closed plan shows each figure of each period four ways: planned, surveyed (the ground lost between the start and the end of the period, from a running surface, for the tonnes figures), filed on the parameter the figure was published onto, and weighed — what crossed the weighbridge over the period, on the total tonnes alone, since a weighbridge sees loads and not ore from waste. The weighbridge stores a bare number, so you state what it records in and the column is read in tonnes; where the account holds no weighbridge the column is empty and the dialog says so. Nothing is stored; it is read from the survey, the readings and the tickets each time, and the export bar takes all four columns away together.

Taking the plan to another package

Once computed, the Exchange menu writes the reserve, the schedule and the demands as CSV, and the whole plan as one JSON document, on the mine grid with the pits named. The same files are served to a program by the exchange API, and a schedule can come back the same way. See A plan, to and from a scheduling package.

Plans by period, on any parameter

Publishing writes into something every parameter has. On a Tracker Group's parameter, and in the form builder where a field is linked to one, Plan by period sits under the single plan figure: a cadence, a start, the derived end, and the figure for the whole period. A reading in a period is judged against that period's figure; a day no period covers falls back to the plan above. Rows a mine plan wrote are marked Set by a mine plan and are changed from the plan.

Approval before publishing

Publishing is a commitment the mine budgets against, so it can be made to wait for a sign-off. On the Plans register, Approval of plans (level 6, admin or the account holder) sets a chain of desks for a Tracker Group: stage one, stage two and so on, each naming the members or clearance levels who may sign there and whether the account holder may too. Stage two opens only once stage one has signed. Nobody signs twice: someone who signed an earlier stage is turned away from a later one, so no one person clears the whole chain — unless that later stage has Earlier signer may sign on, for a small mine where one person holds both desks. A group with no chain publishes straight away.

With a chain, Publish checks everything a publish checks and then parks the plan as Awaiting approval, naming the desk it is waiting on. Nothing is on the parameters yet, and the plan is locked. An approver at that stage sees Approve and Decline on the plan: approving signs it on to the next desk, and the last approval writes the figures; declining sends the plan back to its planner as a draft with the reason shown on it. Whoever asked, or the account holder, may Withdraw the request. The register shows an awaiting plan as such.

Approve and Decline are held to the request that was on your screen when you pressed them. Where the planner withdrew it, changed the plan and asked again while you were still reading — or while your decision sat queued with no signal — you are told "Someone else changed this plan a moment ago. Reload it, then try again." and nothing is signed, declined or published: reload, read the figures as they are now, and decide again.

Nobody has to keep the register open to notice. When a plan reaches a desk, every approver at that stage is told on their subscribed devices, the way a form awaiting their signature tells them; when it is sent back or published, the planner who asked is told, with the reason where there is one. On the register, a plan waiting on you reads Awaiting your approval, the header counts how many are, and Show → Awaiting my approval narrows the register to those.

An approver with no signal can still decide. Approve and Decline queue on the device like a form filed underground and go up the moment it next sees a connection; the plan on screen stays as it was, because nothing has changed on the server yet. See Working offline.

The ground it was published from

When a plan's figures are written, the plan records which pickups made the ground as of its date, pit by pit, and which adjustments cut them. A published plan lists them under Published from these pickups. If a pickup is later re-dated, added under that date, or taken out of the running surface — or an adjustment made or undone — the plan says so in a warning above its figures. The figures stand as published; a re-plan reads the ground as it is now.

Access

You may	From
Read plans and plan periods	Level 1
Create, compute, publish or unpublish a plan; set plans by period	Level 4
Remove a plan	Level 6

A plan belongs to the pit's Tracker Group, so the whitelist that governs surveys governs plans. Publishing also checks every target parameter is one you may see.