SSR Mining's planners turned mine strategy into a five-hour integer program

A hard-rock mining partner needed to compare investment strategies and extraction schedules. Engineers could make schedules manually, but scenario analysis over commodity price, crew productivity, plant size and equipment availability was too slow.

The solution was a custom integer program that scheduled notional ore and waste blocks at daily fidelity. It was built for project-specific constraints, rather than forcing mine planners into a generic planning package.

The model produced long-term schedules within five hours. That changed planning throughput from about 30 evaluations per man-week to more than 2,000, a 65-fold increase in scenario capacity.

In a representative operation, the tool found diminishing returns beyond 2 million metric tons per year of plant capacity and identified a 1.5 million metric ton configuration as most capital efficient. The useful trick was turning strategy into fast parametric search.

Make every ore block a schedulable option

Daily block scheduling preserved operational detail while still enabling strategic comparisons.

Fast scenario runs let planners quantify trade-offs instead of debating single-point schedules.

A tailored model handled mine-specific constraints that generic tools often miss.

For capital-heavy projects, the genius is often not one perfect plan; it is making hundreds of plausible plans cheap enough to compare.

The 2026 INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics article presents the model as an in-house decision-support approach for capital-intensive mining projects where customization, speed and scenario breadth matter.