The company said the addition of advanced scheduling will allow for modelling of more complex planning environments at the Lite Edition level, including multiple processing plants, the decision of optimal material paths for various alternative destinations as well as determining optimal cut-off grades.

The company said the new release also has functionality and efficiency enhancements for pit/dump group definition along with 3-D visualisation and reporting.

"With respect to performance, the previous CPU core limit has been removed from Minemax Scheduler's optimization engine, which can now utilise more CPU cores than before," CEO Joe Kraft said.

"This may result in faster solve times for projects, allowing planners to achieve more in less time."

He noted that the scheduling engine analyses users' decisions together with the extraction sequence, haulage, stockpiling and blending to generate a plan that honours all constraints.

"This gives mine planners a very powerful tool that evaluates numerous scenarios for their strategic mine plan, all within one single optimisation run," he added.

Minemax Scheduler 7.0.4 is now available for all maintained or subscribed Minemax Scheduler users through its Minemax Software Manager (MSM).