The Three Phases of Mine Planning

November 14, 2014

By GEOVIA Team
This is Part Three in a series on Strategic Mine Planning by Darrienne Thobaven,
one of our Strategic Mine Planning Knowledge Consultants. Part One focused on P
utting the Strategy Back into Strategic Mine Planning. Part Two discussed Taking
the Pain out of Tactical Planning.
A good quality mine planning process includes both strategic and tactical compon
ents. When a flawed planning process is employed, issues often manifest in the s
hort term or production planning areas. A three phased mine planning process can
be employed to avoid this tactical planning pain in an open cut mine.
The threePV Schedules
The first phase results in practical NPV-based schedules. The schedules include
pit stage selection (chosen from a series of nested pit shell candidates and Le
rch Grossman algorithm, the truly strategic planning begins with scenario analys
is of multiple schedules representing different strategies. The pit shells for t
he interim stages have a greater impact on NPV than the stages in later years of
the mine life; therefore, optimum interim pit shell selection is vital for stra
tegic planning success. Interim pit shells are not an input to the schedule, but
rather an output of an automated scheduler which has all of the pit shell candi
dates to choose from.
The pit shells also need to be modified for minimum mining dimensions while mini
mizing the reduction in NPV. GEOVIA Whittle s NPVP module automatically finds the
pit shells for the interim stages with the highest NPV after modifications are m
ade for mining equipment practicalities. It also finds the mining sequence that
generates