Mining activities often cause environmental damages that result in ecosystem damage. Loss of forest vegetation, flora, fauna, and soil layers are just some examples of the other damages. Therefore, each company that carries out the mining activities are obliged to do reclamation and revegetation over the mined field to control and restore the area after the mining activities.

In general, to restore the damaged field and vegetation, especially the ones caused by mining activities, the soil environment should be the top priority. It is because the soil becomes nutrient deficient post-mining activities. Refilling the ex-mine pits, structuring soil surface and slope stability, controlling sedimentation and erosion, as well as sowing topsoil, are supposed to be done prior to the revegetation.

SPRY Scheduler is concerned about users’ needs in disposal planning and soil spreading patterns to do revegetation planning. In general, the plan for soil dumping and spreading can be simplified as follows:

1. Soil removal: in planning, users need to pay attention to the loading pattern for the pit area and the dumping pattern in the disposal area (stock soil). To determine the pattern, SPRY has a dependency function that helps users find the soil mining pattern. Two of the dependencies features available are cone and offset dependency.
2. Soil Spreading in disposal areas or ex-mining areas with Stock soil material, which is also named material rehandling. The SPRY scheduler has a Stockpile feature for rehandling cases. The Stockpile feature helps the users schedule the transfer of material from material that was originally disposed of/ dumped to pit/sourced. The stockpile feature can be used for several activities, such as making temporary roads, soil spreading, Stock Coal management, etc.
3. Things that need considering in soil spreading is the readiness of the land to be covered with soil. SPRY scheduler manages this by using the range dependency and time constraint features to prevent material from overlapping as the land is not ready for soil spreading.
4. Furthermore, when the user wants to spread soil with a combination of materials, either the material directly from the pit or the stock soil, SPRY helps divide the destination paths.

An outlook graphic of the scheduling is beneficial. It can help users to ensure that the scheduling is all set up as expected. The SPRY scheduler can produce graphical output in the form of images, videos, and grids.

The following is an example of images generated by the SPRY Scheduler:

a. Dumpling soil on Stock Soil

b. Soil Spreading using materials from the Stock Soil

c. Soil Spreading using materials from Stock Soil and Pit

The last important thing that users should do after building the scheduling model is analysing the result. SPRY scheduler accommodates it with pivot table feature as a quick reporting. Reporting to determine the productivity potential of the mechanical devices, the amount of volume of soil required and the length of the period for spreading. The following is the example of report generated by the SPRY Scheduler.

a. Equipment Productivity

b. Soil Removal and Soil Spreading (from stock soil) Volume

c. Soil Removal and Soil Spreading (from stock soil and Pit) Volume

Results of the scheduling example above show that soil removal work began in January (the beginning of mining) and ended in March. Meanwhile, the soil spreading was carried out in March and ended in April.

SPRY, with its capabilities, can assist users much in scheduling activities for soil spreading. With its user-friendly features and built on a 64-bit architecture, SPRY can perform scheduling quickly and accommodate large amounts of data.