The common practice of the medium- and long-term mine planning is to set the production plans in terms of the maximal Net Present Value (NPV) as a target by the use of optimisation software packages. These computational tools use simplistic representations of the whole productive system as a flow network expressed on a yearly basis. As such, these tools require of technical parameters related to production capacity and flexibilities of the different processes, for example, energy consumption considerations of the crushing and milling processes, and the use of availability and utilisation factors as a maintenance programme effects estimation. Therefore, when relatively short stockpiles exist between mine haulage, crushing and milling processes with respect to the whole system capacity, the mine and metallurgical planning requires to be supported by a more detailed and systemic analysis of these processes.
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