A heuristic method for production scheduling of an open pit mining operation

ABSTRACT

A mathematical model for production scheduling of open pit mines maximises the net present value and satisfies the reserves, pit slope angle, and production capacity constraints. A solution to this model aims to deliver an extraction sequence and the movement of materials across various stages within the operation over a defined planning horizon. However, given that the mineral reserves delineated into thousands of mining blocks form the geological input, the model falls in the category of large-scale optimisation problems, i.e. it is computationally intractable, and exact methods cannot solve realistic scenarios of the problem. Therefore, this paper contributes an alternative to the conventional mathematical model along with a corresponding heuristic method to solve this proposed model. An implementation of the proposed method at various realistic instances reveals better performance in terms of net present value, computation time and optimality gap as compared to the traditional methods.

KEYWORDS:

• Scheduling
• optimisation
• open pit mining
• heuristic methods
• exact methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The datasets used or analysed in this study are available in the public domain at Minelib espinoza2013minelib. The link to these datasets in Minelib is http://mansci-web.uai.cl/minelib/Datasets.xhtml.