Optimal control approaches for open pit planning

This work tackles the open pit planning problem in an optimal control framework. We study optimality conditions for so-called continuous formulation using Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle, and introduce a new, semi-continuous that can handle optimization of two-dimensional mine profile. Numerical simulations are provided several test cases, including global one-dimensional final pit, first results sequential pit. Theses indicate good consistency between different approaches, with theoretical conditions.