A mine changes with every step forward — the terrain, the strata, the exposed surfaces. How can a single model remember all of it?

This demonstration features a large open-pit coal mine in western China. It is a sedimentary deposit worked by bench mining: nineteen designed benches, 12,283 mining blocks. Each step cuts away a single block, presenting the mine's evolution as one continuous process.

Why Not Save the Whole Model Over and Over

Each excavation removes a local block, and new strata are exposed in its place. Yet for the mine as a whole, the vast majority of the structure remains identical.

If every moment were stored as a full copy of the model, storage and transmission loads would grow exponentially as mining advances. Tens of thousands of updates — must we really keep tens of thousands of complete models?

4D Tiles: Adding Time to 3D Tiling

GridWorld uses 4D Tiles technology: building on 3D Tiles spatial tiling, it introduces the time dimension, so that a single model can organize the states of many different moments.

Its core idea is simple — record only the changes.

The initial model forms the shared base. Each excavation stores only the data of the changed region, tied to its corresponding time step, while unchanged parts are continuously reused. As mining advances, new states are appended one after another, and the model retains a continuous record of its evolution.

Zoom out for the overall picture; zoom in for local detail. Time tells us when a change happened; spatial tiling and multi-resolution help us see where it happened.

From Visualization to the Full Lifecycle

Every change in the model corresponds to an entry in the mining-and-stripping ledger. Tallying coal volume, rock volume, and stripping ratio along the mining sequence — then combining these with price, cost, and capacity assumptions — reveals the input–output profile of each stage and offers a reference for scheduling.

As mining advances, slope conditions shift with it. Linking the stage models to geomechanical analysis allows further study of stress, deformation, and stability, giving resource recovery and safety assessment a shared spatial basis.

From the first cut to the ultimate pit limit, the full picture of the mine unfolds over time. Tens of thousands of updates, all sharing a single model base.

GridWorld — a continuously evolving digital model, serving the mine's entire lifecycle.