Hyper-heuristic approaches for strategic mine planning under uncertainty

1 Heuristic Search for Planning under Uncertainty

Modern Strategic Mine Planning

If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top...that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem. (Fuller 1969, ...

A Fast Pairwise Heuristic for Planning under Uncertainty

POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process) is a mathematical framework that models planning under uncertainty. Solving a POMDP is an intractable problem and even the state of the art POMDP solvers are too computationally expensive for large domains. This is a major bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic, called the pairwise heuristic, that can be used in a one-step gree...

Heuristic Optimization of Scheduling Scenarios for Achieving Strategic Mine Planning Targets

An optimization process is described that can be systematically applied by mine planners to produce life-of-mine schedules aligned with their strategic targets, while maximizing the net present value of the mining operation. The software tool employed uses heuristics and an evolutionary algorithm to generate life-of-mine schedules of production and development activities. Generating such schedu...

A practical approach to open-pit mine planning under price uncertainty using information gap decision theory

In the context of open-pit mine planning, uncertainties including commodity price would significantly affect the technical and financial aspects of mining projects. A mine planning that takes place regardless of the uncertainty in price just develops an optimized plan at the starting time of the mining operation. Given the price change over the life of mine, which is quite certain, optimality o...