Production planning of an open-pit mine is a procedure during which the rock blocks are assigned to different production periods in a way that leads to the highest net present value (NPV) subject to some operational and technical constraints. This process becomes much more complicated by incorporation of the uncertainty existing in the input parameters. The commodity price uncertainty is among ...

Planning and design procedure of an open pit mining project just can be started after ultimate pit determination. In the carried out study in this paper it was shown that the most important factor in ultimate pit determination and in consequence in the whole planning and design procedure of an open pit mine is the metal price. Metal price fluctuations in recent years were exaggerated and impose...

In an Open-Pit Production Scheduling (OPPS) problem, the goal is to determine the mining sequence of an orebody as a block model. In this article, linear programing formulation is used to aim this goal. OPPS problem is known as an NP-hard problem, so an exact mathematical model cannot be applied to solve in the real state. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a well-known member of evolutionary algorithms...

One of the most effective parameters in economics of open-pit mines is the pit slope angle, so that the slope angle more than the optimum value increases the probability of a large failure in the pit wall and the slope angle less than the optimum value leads to increasing stripping ratio and reducing net present value of mine. Therefore, in this paper, considering the limit equilibrium methods ...

all steps of a mining project generally disturb the environment'soriginal condition during construction. therefore, it is crucial toimplement an appropriate mine reclamation plan throughout all mineplanning stages from sustainable and environmental point of view.planting the suitable plant species in each step of any reclamationplan and each area is one of the necessities in this respect.select...

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...

One of the key issues in mining is the hauling system. Truck and shovels are the most widely used transportation equipment in mines. In this paper, a two-phase simulation-based optimization is presented to maximize utilization of hauling system in the largest Iranian open-pit copper mine. In the first phase, The OptQuest for Arena software package was used to solve the optimization problem to p...

The open pit design and scheduling problem is a large-scale optimization problem that has attracted considerable attention during the last 40 years The development of the "know-how" to improve economics of open pit mining projects through the use of mathematical optimization techniques goes back to early 1960's. Unfortunately, up until recently, many of these "optimizing algorithms" could not b...

This document presents material supplementary to our companion paper A Decomposition-Based Heuristic for Collaborative Scheduling in a Network of Open-Pit Mines. In this companion paper, we consider the short-term production scheduling problem for a network of multiple open-pit mines and ports. Ore produced at each mine is transported by rail to a set of ports and blended into signature product...

In open-pit mine planning, the design of the most profitable ultimate pit limit is a prerequisite to developing a feasible mining sequence. Currently, the design of an ultimate pit is achieved through a computer program in most mining companies. The extraction of minerals in open mining methods needs a lot of capital investment, which may take several decades. Before the extraction, the p...