Mintec’s mission to boost mining productivity gets a boost with the release of an improved schedule optimiser. MineSight Schedule Optimizer Version 4.5 builds on a completely new user interface and increased processing power. The latest improvements solidify MSSO as ideal software for mine-planners.

“Our scheduling suite of tools continues to storm ahead,” said Glenn Wylde, Mintec Vice President-Technical. “MSSO, with its graphical integration, Gantt charting, and the coupling of an equipment cycle database has proven to be a huge leap forward.”

MSSO determines the most productive cut mining sequence to achieve maximum profitability. It generates practical short to medium term project schedules and satisfies all project quality, quantity, market, and geotechnical constraints.

The improvements released include the following:

• Solid Scheduling – Generate schedules for both 3DBM and GSM solids. Create polygon/2D and solid
  cuts in one IP set and import them to one mining area in MSSO for scheduling.
  Stockpile Reclaim Methods – Available stockpile reclaim methods include first-in-first-out (FIFO), last-in-first-out (LIFO), Average and Any. Stockpile reclaim method can vary from stockpile to stockpile.
  Min/Max Bench Lag/Lead Constraints – Along with phase precedence, you can also specify how many benches (or levels) one phase can lead/lag another phase by. These constraints ensure you don’t go too deep in one phase.
  Destination Availability Constraints – Specify that a destination is available (or not available) in some periods. If a destination is not available in a period, then the engine will honor it and make sure no materials are sent to or reclaimed from that destination.
  Defining stockpile reclaim graphically – Graphically define stockpile-to-mill reclaim relationship by simply dragging links between stockpile and mill destinations. This is easier and more intuitive than using a table. Many new features have been added to Canvas, such as label fonts, color, size, link thickness, colour, Canvas background colour, etc.
• Speed-up on loading cuts – Loading cuts to MSSO is much faster, especially for larger projects with thousands of cuts. A project (15,000 cuts) tested internally, which used to take about four minutes for loading cuts, took only 40 seconds.
• ARC enhancements – More consistency between MSSO and MineSight’s Advanced Reporting and Charting tool. Learn ARC in one tool, and you can easily use ARC in other tools. Add multiple summary reports and charts to the same report, and customise your reports and charts with the end user designer (EUD).