When I was at university, for my undergraduate thesis, I wrote an excel add-in that performed pit optimisation calculations.

Over the years, I’ve received a surprising amount of requests for UPL. There’s definitely a demand for a free pit-optimisation program, particularly for universities and other smaller organisations that cannot afford expensive full-featured packages such as Whittle.

It’s particularly good for students, as it can teach the basics of block-model optimisation without getting too bogged down in fine details, or for creating a first-pass result. Having Excel as its front-end was an excellent choice, as it is a user interface that everyone understands.

The original site I had for UPL is dead, so I thought I’d create this page, and redirect the original page here.

You can download UPL from this link.