Operations and Production Cycles

An operation is the smallest element in DTS's model of any mining process. It is also called a unit operation of mining or production operation, and is one of the basic steps employed to produce mineral from the deposit. It only has relevance for cyclic tasks, as defined in Short-term scheduling \ Cyclic tasks. Operations can be defined in DTS in the Project Settings form on the Short-term Items page, and could be e.g. cut, drill, blast, haul etc.

When combined in a particular sequence, these operations form a production cycle, e.g. a general production cycle could be cut+drill+blast+load+haul+hoist, or a more conventional cycle could be drill+blast+load+haul.

Production cycles can be defined in DTS in the Project Settings form. When such a production cycle is applied to a task, the task will perform these operations in sequence, and will repeat the cycle until the required quantity has been produced/processed.