Surface Production Scheduling in MineSched

This course covers short-term surface production scheduling in MineSched, the final tutorial in the surface scheduling series. It builds on long-term scheduling, taking a completed long-term plan and adding the detail needed to make the next three months practical for the mining crews. You'll begin by organising your data into a logical directory structure and reviewing the inputs that scheduling depends on — pit and stage designs, topography, and a block model carrying grade, material class, specific gravity and rock type. From there you'll create short-term polygons from the long-term schedule, dividing each period into smaller areas that reflect the way equipment actually moves around the pit, and set up a MineSched scenario to manage the work. The course then works through mining locations in depth. You'll learn the difference between the Polygon and Bench Polygon methods and when each applies, including mining to a seam boundary, mining a single bench, mining a bench by flitches, and using different polygons across separate benches. You'll sequence polygons both by typing string ranges and by selecting them graphically in Surpac, and see how an incorrect sequence causes undermining. The course also covers the precedences and parameters that apply specifically to group mining. You'll then add the ancillary activities that make a short-term schedule realistic. Drilling and blasting are set up with their own precedences, work quantities, crews and rates, and animated graphically so you can validate that activities aren't clashing with mining. You'll see why adding these activities breaks a schedule that previously fit, and how to resolve it by adding production resources and accounting for the drilling lead time. The course closes with reporting and analysis — detailed and summary custom reports, Gantt charts, and checking the schedule against the mill's daily gold requirement by adding stockpiles and process rates. An optional final section covers production activities, an alternative approach where drilling and blasting are modelled as independent locations rather than tied to the mining sequence.