AusIMM Strategic Mine Planning Conference 2026: Dates, Program and What Contractors Should Take From It

The Strategic Mine Planning Conference (SMP2026) is an AusIMM technical conference dedicated to mine planning and orebody modelling. Its 2026 tagline is Connecting SMP and orebody modelling, with a program built around digitalisation and intelligent systems transforming mineral value chains. Unlike investment or trade-show events, this is a genuinely technical conference — the room is mining engineers, geologists, resource modellers, optimisation specialists and academics arguing about how the plan gets built.

SMP2026 runs 17-19 November 2026 at the Residence on Langley Park, 99 Adelaide Terrace, Perth WA 6000. The venue is a premium riverside space in the Perth CBD overlooking the Swan River, walking distance to city accommodation and a short run from Perth Airport. AusIMM has secured discounted delegate rates at nearby 4 and 5-star hotels through Ozaccom. The event hashtag is #SMP2026.

AusIMM lists 24 professional development (PD) hours for the full conference. For AusIMM members and Chartered Professionals maintaining CPD, that is a substantial single-event contribution — worth confirming against your own registration category, since PD hours typically depend on attending the full three days rather than a single day pass.

It is easy to write SMP off as an owner-team event. That is a mistake. The mine plan is the demand signal for every contractor on site. Waste movement schedules drive earthmoving and haulage. Sequencing drives when dewatering, drill and blast, and civil works get called up. Strategic plan revisions are what turn a five-year maintenance contract into a two-year one — or the reverse. If you understand how the operations you service build and revise their plans, you can forecast your own workload instead of reacting to it.

The 2026 framing — digitalisation and intelligent systems — reflects where mine planning has moved: stochastic optimisation, digital twins, near-real-time reconciliation between plan and actual, and machine learning applied to orebody uncertainty. The practical consequence for service providers is that owners increasingly expect their contractors to feed clean, structured data back: actual hours, actual volumes, actual downtime, timestamped and reconcilable. Paper dockets and end-of-month spreadsheets do not plug into a digital twin.

Mining engineers and planners, resource geologists and orebody modellers, optimisation and technical services specialists, operations and technical managers, consultants and software vendors in the planning space, and researchers and postgraduate students. Contractors sending someone should send a technical or operations lead, not a salesperson — the value is in understanding how your clients' plans are constructed and where the uncertainty sits.

Three concrete takeaways worth targeting: (1) which planning software and frameworks your major clients are standardising on, because that shapes the data formats they will eventually ask you for; (2) how operations are handling plan-versus-actual reconciliation, which tells you what reporting cadence you will be held to; and (3) where the sequencing risk sits on projects near you, because that is where scope gets added or deferred at short notice.

AusIMM runs several conferences across the 2026 calendar. International Mining Geology (April, Brisbane) is upstream of SMP and focused on the orebody itself. The International Mine Health & Safety Conference (October, Perth) is the safety and risk event. Critical Minerals (September, Brisbane) is commodity-focused. SMP2026 sits squarely on the engineering decision layer — how you turn a resource model into a defensible schedule and a value-maximising plan.

17-19 November places SMP2026 in the same fortnight as the Townsville Summit (11-12 November) and a few weeks after IMARC 2026 (27-29 October, ICC Sydney). If you are budgeting for one technical conference in Q4 and one commercial one, SMP2026 and IMARC are the natural pair. Register early — AusIMM conferences at boutique venues like the Residence on Langley Park have capacity limits.