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...

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, ...

In this paper we show that the problem of optimal mine planning can be cast in the framework of receding horizon control. Traditional formulations of this problem have cast it in the framework of mixed integer linear programming. In this paper, we present an alternative formulation of the mine planning problem using the “language” of control engineering. We show that this alternative formulatio...

Applications of operations research to mine planning date back to the 1960s. Since that time, optimization and simulation, in particular, have been applied to both surface and underground mine planning problems, including mine design, longand short-term production scheduling, equipment selection, and dispatching, inter alia. In this paper, we review several decades of such literature with a par...

In order to carry out an open pit mining operation, planners must periodically prepare what is known as strategic mine plan. This is a tentative production schedule for the remaining life of the mine that defines which area of a mining reserve will be extracted, in what years this extraction will take place, which resources will be used for the extraction, and how the extracted material will be...

Production scheduling (planning) of an open-pit mine is the procedure during which the rock blocks are assigned to different production periods in a way that the highest net present value of the project achieved subject to operational constraints. The paper introduces a new and computationally less expensive meta-heuristic technique known as imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) for long-term...

Due to uncertain nature of grade in ore deposits, considering uncertainty is inevitable in geological modelling of resources and mine planning. In other words, uncertainty in grade of mineralized materials, is one of the most significant parameters need attention in mine planning. In this paper, a comparative procedure utilizing Sequential Gaussian Simulation (SGS) and traditional Ordinary Krig...

Modern mine planning software plays a crucial role in the operation of many of the world’s mining operations and projects. Mine planning software provides the mining industry with a fast, accurate, cost effective and efficient tool in order to manage their business interests worldwide. Every aspect of the mining industry is today using some form of mine planning software. From exploration to re...

We have developed path-planning techniques and tools to look for paths through minefields. Our techniques seek to balance the length and risk associated with different routes through a minefield. Our methods are intended to provide battlegroup commanders powerful new tools to evaluate alternative routes while searching for low risk paths. It is well known how to find the path of shortest distan...

It is well recognized that software tools for strategic underground mine planning are lacking, and that the demand for these tools will increase as deeper deposits amenable to underground mining continue to grow in value. While a number of optimization techniques have been developed for stope layout design and progress continues to be made in the area of production scheduling, both of these min...