Mass Haul Diagram
Within a Mass Haul Diagram, there are several parts:
Black line - 0 mass flow; above this line the system is in surplus and below the system is in deficit.
Green line - the amount of usable earthworks available at a particular point along an alignment.
Red line - the amount of unusable material being carried. In cases where there are no dump sites, unusable material is hauled to the closest start or finish point.
Green arrows - direction earthworks are moved; left to right is from start to finish, and right to left is finish back to start.
The left of the diagram represents the start point and the right represents the finish point.
In calculating alignments, the Quantm system tries to balance earthworks with the aim of finishing the optimization with neither deficit nor surplus. This is not always possible, and when the system isn't able to balance the cut and flow, the start and finish points are used as implicit dump and borrow locations.
When looking at the mass flow diagram; from right to left, deficit is recognized above the 0 mass flow line, while surplus is below. When the green line is above the 0 mass flow line earthworks are moved from left to right, when it is below earthworks are moved from right to left. Material can be moved in either direction, the system tries to avoid hauling earthworks past the midpoint of the alignment in either direction and tries to maintain 0 mass flow as close to this point as possible.
The amount of dump is calculated from what is left of the usable material defined in the cost parameters. This means for '0% usable' (strip) everything cut from that stratum is dumped, and '100% usable' infers that nothing is dumped from the cut from a particular stratum, and anything in between is handled accordingly.