MineSight presented numerous improvements in last week’s release of Atlas 1.9, many of them in response to direct requests from mine planners. “We are dedicated to ensuring our clients get more time to make decisions while MineSight takes care of details,” said Glenn Wylde, MineSight Vice President-Technical. “Short-term planning in particular is fraught with pressure so Atlas is designed to make life easier for mine engineers.”

Atlas 1.9 adds a whole new world of CAD design. Gone are the days of countless click-click-clicks to design mining cuts. Atlas’s automatic activity designer builds mining activities straight from a centreline, and clipped to a limiting boundary, allowing users to easily adjust the swath and target tonnes or volume. Quick hotkey adjustments can revise the swath and all automatically built cuts can be pushed to the activity model and be assigned to a resource. “We want the user to be able to spend more time refining the schedule than perfecting CAD skills,” said Wylde.

Atlas 1.9 further integrates MineSight Axis for grade control. Axis users will now be able to build their daily dig mining blocks directly from Atlas or MineSight Planner. You can quickly build remaining stocks of block-outs from fleet management dig-points. Improved Gantt printing, simple to configure rolling reports and the automatic ability to complete tasks by a given date are also included in Atlas 1.9.

Since being introduced last year, Atlas has been adopted by planning departments in some of the world’s biggest mines. Together with recent improvements, which saw support for complex coal and improvements to Resource Gantt charts, Version 1.9 continues to build the software’s reputation as an essential product for mine planning.