Optimising the mine production scheduling accounting for stockpiling and investment decisions under geological uncertainty

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an approach to optimise the long-term production scheduling of an open pit mine with multiple processing streams, while accounting for investment decisions under mineral supply uncertainty. The solution approach consists of first solving the linear relaxation using an extension of the Bienstock-Zuckerberg algorithm to the stochastic optimisation. Then, a rounding heuristic based on the topological sorting is applied, followed by a parallel multi-neighbourhood Tabu search. The proposed method is applied to a multi-product open pit mine deposit, with the possibility of investing in new shovels, trucks or crushers to increase related capacities.

KEYWORDS:

• Open pit scheduling
• stochastic mathematical optimisation
• capital expenditures
• parallelisation

Acknowledgments

The work in this paper was funded from NSERC CRD Grant 500414-16, NSERC Discovery Grant 239019, the Canada Research Chairs Programme, and the industry members of the COSMO Stochastic Mine Planning Laboratory: AngloGold Ashanti, BHP, AngloAmerican, De Beers, IAMGOLD, Kinross Gold, Newmont, and Vale. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [239019]