Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-14-2022

Department

Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences

Abstract

Open pit mine production scheduling is a computationally expensive large-scale mixed-integer linear programming problem. This research develops a computationally efficient algorithm to solve open pit production scheduling problems under uncertain geological parameters. The proposed solution approach for production scheduling is a two-stage process. The stochastic production scheduling problem is iteratively solved in the first stage after relaxing resource constraints using a parametric graph closure algorithm. Finally, the branch-and-cut algorithm is applied to respect the resource constraints, which might be violated during the first stage of the algorithm. Six small-scale production scheduling problems from iron and copper mines were used to validate the proposed stochastic production scheduling model. The results demonstrated that the proposed method could significantly improve the computational time with a reasonable optimality gap (the maximum gap is 4%). In addition, the proposed stochastic method is tested using industrial-scale copper data and compared with its deterministic model. The results show that the net present value for the stochastic model improved by 6% compared to the deterministic model.

Publisher's Statement

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/mining2010003

Publication Title

Mining

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

Publisher's PDF

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