For the purpose of production scheduling, open-pit mines are discretized into three-dimensional arrays known as block models. Production scheduling consists of deciding which blocks should be extracted, when they should be extracted, and what to do with the blocks once they are extracted. Blocks that are close to the surface should be extracted first, and capacity constraints limit the producti...

Production scheduling in underground mines is still a manual process, and achieving a truly optimal result through manual scheduling is impossible due to the complexity of the scheduling problems. Among the underground mining methods, sub-level caving is a common mining method with a high production rate for hard rock mining. There are limited studies about long-term production scheduling...

Optimisation tools which determine the best layout for access and haulage in an underground mine address an important and difficult mine design problem. The complexity of the problem can be compared to the task of optimising the final pit design in an open pit, together with the pit haul roads required. The strategic design of an underground mine layout must address the location of haulage shaf...

the determination of the ultimate pit limit (upl) is the first step in the open pit mine planning process. in this stage that parts of the mineral deposit that are economic to mine are determined. there are several mathematical, heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms to determine upl. the optimization criterion in these algorithms is maximization of the total profit whilst satisfying the...

Uncertainty is an inherent aspect of the open-pit mine production scheduling problem (MPSP); however, little is reported in the literature about solution methods for the stochastic versions of the problem. In this paper, two variants of a variable neighbourhood descent algorithm are proposed for solving the MPSP with metal uncertainty. The proposed methods are tested and compared on actual larg...

Uncertainty is an inherent aspect of the open-pit mine production scheduling problem (MPSP); however, little is reported in the literature about solution methods for the stochastic versions of the problem. In this paper, two variants of a variable neighbourhood descent algorithm are proposed for solving the MPSP with metal uncertainty. The proposed methods are tested and compared on actual larg...

We consider the multiple time period short-term production scheduling problem for a network of multiple open-pit mines and ports. Ore produced at each mine, in each period, is transported by rail to a set of ports and blended into products for shipping. Each port forms these blends to a specification, as stipulated in contracts with downstream customers. This problem belongs to a class of multi...

in this study, a hybrid intelligent model has been designed to predict groundwater inflow to a mine pit during its advance. novel hybrid method coupling artificial neural network (ann) with genetic algorithm (ga) called ann-ga, was utilised. ratios of pit depth to aquifer thickness, pit bottom radius to its top radius, inverse of pit advance time and the hydraulic head (hh) in the observation w...