Advanced MSO Settings

Note: This screen is not relevant to the Prism framework type.

Advanced settings are primarily associated with Standard Slice Frameworks and Advanced Slice Frameworks slice frameworks in MSO, providing more granular control over the stope optimization algorithm.

These settings help refine the structure, resolution, and configuration of stopes beyond the base geometry defined in the Shapes and Framework screens.

This includes options to break down full stopes into smaller sub-stopes, apply refinement logic, handle narrow ore, or link stopes to structural constraints like control surfaces and development headings.

Advanced tab options are especially useful when:

  • You require more selective or segmented output (such as smaller, more flexible stopes).

  • You need shapes to follow development layout or mining fronts.

  • You want to implement custom refinement rules for slope, smoothness, or contact alignment.

Note: If your framework is oriented using the Boundary method, a single advanced setting is available to enable or disable boundary surface averaging.

Structure Surface Control and Slice Intervals

MSO will only produce stope-shapes if seed-shapes are created.

Seed-shapes define the number and approximate location of stope-shapes. A Stope Control Surface is used to locally define the strike and dip orientation of the stope-shapes for the mineralized economic component of the orebody.

Seed-shapes are formed by aggregating seed-slices to model the stope width, pillar width and dilution. The choice of slice interval will affect the accuracy of the seed-shape optimization.

While a geological wireframe can be a good proxy for the Stope Control Surface, in some cases these wireframes can be large, or have local inflections that can incorrectly influence MSO when generating slices. The geological wireframe may be well understood by the geologist but should not automatically be adopted by the Mining Engineer. It is better practice to digitise a set of strings section by section to define the local dip, and create one or more wireframe surfaces.

Also:

  • Make sure that these surface(s) extend past the mineralized zone. One technique for reducing the number of triangles is to use the wireframe-decimate command.

  • A Structure Surface is mandatory for all but the simplest orebodies.

  • The Structure Surface need only have a few thousand triangles, and certainly not 20-100,000 triangles, which will result in too many dip and strike indicators with the potential to provide conflicting data. A simple, decimated surface file is a far better option.

  • A stope slice interval where the minimum stope width is 3-5 times the slice interval is usually a good guide.

  • The dip and strike orientation taken from the Structure Surface, or the Default Dip and Default Strike parameters, must fall within the minimum and maximum dip and strike ranges set for the stope geometry.

Summary

This part of the MSO workflow is used to:

  • Refine and MSO slice shape framework with narrow ore, development shapes, sub-stope methods, and shape smoothing.

  • Control boundary surface averaging if using the boundary framework orientation method.