Run every scenario worth running

Strategic scheduling has always been bounded by what a solver can hold in one pass. To get a long-horizon answer out in reasonable time, some of the operating detail has to be set aside. Every strategic planner knows this trade-off and manages it well, which is why the plans that come out the other side still work. The cost is that one end-to-end pass takes hours or days, so a study that would benefit from testing dozens of scenarios usually ships with two or three. Cognomine is built to lift that ceiling.

Cognomine encodes more of the operating detail up front and solves it in the cloud. We have benchmarked it on realistic strategic scenarios and it returned practical schedules in minutes: the same question you have always asked, with more of the constraints left in.

Because a run costs nothing beyond the credit already on your account, you can test every scenario your study calls for: a different commodity price deck, a delayed capital project, a changed cutoff grade, then compare them side by side before you commit to the plan you want to defend. Commodity prices move through cycles, so being able to re-run against several price decks in an afternoon is worth more than getting one deck exactly right.

By more detail we mean the constraints that usually have to be relaxed to keep a long-horizon model solvable: bench and phase sequencing, dig precedence, haulage and processing capacity, blending and grade targets, and the capital and operating trade-offs behind them. Keeping them in gives you a schedule that arrives closer to publishable. The full list is on the how it works page.

Across the strategic scenarios we have benchmarked so far, Cognomine returned workable schedules in 10 to 20 minutes. On the same problems, open-source solvers had not converged when we stopped them at 12 and 24 hours. Speed is only part of it. Because the model holds more of the real constraints, the schedule it produces lands closer to something your operations team can act on straight away.