Software for the determination of 
optimal profiles for slopes 
and pitwalls

On a mission to transform mining into an efficient and clean business

Customers and industrial partners

The current issues in open pit mining:

High costs

The excavation of a mine incurs costs typically in the order of hundreds of million USD. Lower costs would allow higher profitability and more mining projects coming to fruition.

Long time to design

Current pitwall profiles are designed by geotechnical consultants on the basis of their experience and overly simplified formulae (e.g. use of stability charts). No software for the design of pitwalls exist.

High carbon footprint

Mining is a highly carbon intensive industry needing urgent solutions to reduce mining carbon footprint. 

Inefficient design

The current life-of-mine design methodology is sequential: pitwall profiles are provided by geotechnical consultants to mining engineers who run pit optimisers. No iterations are performed between pit optimisation and pitwall design so the resulting mine design (pushbacks and UPL) often turn out to be highly suboptimal.  

The benefits brought by OptimalSlope:

Optimize Project NPV

OptimalSlope has been tested on 4 peer reviewed case studies of small-medium metalliferous mines with increases of Net Present Value obtained in comparison with the design based on traditional methodology of up to 52%. 

Reduce Carbon Footprint

Optimal pitwall profiles enable average reductions of CO2 equivalent emissions of 30,000 tonnes a year per mine. If our solution was adopted globally, 200 million tonnes of CO2 a year could be saved.

Intelligent and efficient mining design 

OptimalSlope replaces the need for time consuming back and forth between geotechnical and mining teams. OptimalSlope’s pitwalls can be fed directly into the pit optimiser of choice to calculate pushbacks and the Ultimate Pit Limit.

Quick and User Friendly

OptimalSlope is highly parallelised so that the heavy calculations involved to find the optimal profile for each sector of a mine pit can be performed in reasonable times. A user friendly GUI is used for the input and output of the data. 

Cloud Based

OptimalSlope does not require any dongle or physical device but it is deployed on the AWS cloud. This allows best management of computational resources so that the right computational power is always made available. 

Bespoke Service

We have a flexible pricing model: you can purchase a licence for use of the code on a subscription basis (annual or monthly) or you can ask a quote for a consultancy to get the strategic design of the mine and anything in between including training.