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...

Open pit mine design and production scheduling deals with the quest for the most profitable mining sequence over the life of a mine. The dynamics of mining ore and waste and the spatial grade uncertainty make predictions of the optimal mining sequence a challenging task. A new optimization approach to production scheduling based on the effective management of waste mining and orebody grade unce...

Determination a sequence of extracting ore is one of the most important problems in mine annual production scheduling. Production scheduling affects mining performance especially in a poly-metallic open pit mine with considering the imposed operational and physical constraints mandated by high levels of reliability in relation to the obtained actual results. One of the important operational con...

We study an extension of the precedence constrained knapsack problem where the knapsack can be filled in multiple periods. This problem is known in the mining industry as the open-pit mine production scheduling problem. We present a new algorithm for solving the LP relaxation of this problem and an LP-based heuristic to obtain feasible solutions. Computational experiments show that we can solve...

This paper investigates the performance of several out-ofthe-box solvers for mixed-integer quadratically constrained programmes (MIQCPs) on an open pit mine production scheduling problem with mixing constraints. We compare the solvers BARON, Couenne, SBB, and SCIP to a problem-specific algorithm on two different MIQCP formulations. The computational results presented show that general-purpose s...

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...

The open-pit mine production scheduling problem has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both in the academic literature, and in the mining industry. Optimization approaches to strategic planning for mine exploitation have become the industry standard, as the recent review of Newman et al. [19] highlights. However most of these approaches focus on extraction sequencing, and don’t...

Similar to the mixed-integer programming library (MIPLIB), we present a library of publicly available test problem instances for three classical types of open pit mining problems: the ultimate pit limit problem and two variants of open pit production scheduling problems. The ultimate pit limit problem determines a set of notional three-dimensional blocks containing ore and/or waste material to ...

The open pit mine production scheduling (OPMPS) problem seeks to determine when, if ever, to extract each notional, three-dimensional block of ore and/or waste in a deposit and what to do with each, e.g., send it to a particular processing plant or to the waste dump. This scheduling model maximizes net present value subject to spatial precedence constraints, and resource capacities. Certain min...