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...

During its 25 years of production from 1972 to 1998, the Gibraltar Cu-Mo mine in east-central British Columbia (Figure 1) milled a total of 324 million tons of ore containing an average 0.351% Cu from four open pits. Fieldwork during 2000 involved just over two weeks of detailed pit mapping at the mine. Results of this work and several earlier intervals of pit mapping conducted in 1998 and 1999...

The open pit mine block sequencing problem (OPBS) seeks a discrete-time production schedule that maximizes the net present value of the orebody extracted from an open-pit mine. This integer program (IP) discretizes the mine’s volume into blocks, imposes precedence constraints between blocks, and limits resource consumption in each time period. We develop a “sliding time window heuristic” to sol...

This paper is based on the open pit to underground mining practice of Daye Iron Mine. The influence mechanism between high-steep slope and non-pillar sublevel caving method is studied by using physical model test. Firstly, engineering geological properties of the choosing typical research section is analysed and generalized. Secondly, the system of open pit to underground mining is developing a...

This work tackles the open pit planning problem in an optimal control framework. We study optimality conditions for so-called continuous formulation using Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle, and introduce a new, semi-continuous that can handle optimization of two-dimensional mine profile. Numerical simulations are provided several test cases, including global one-dimensional final pit, first result...

sarcheshmeh copper mine, with the final reserves of 828 million tons of sulfur ore and average grade of 0.74%, is known to be the largest open pit of iran and most probably the second largest copper mine in the world. this mine is located in the seismotectonic zone of central-iran, and 23 km away from the 150 km long rafsanjan active fault.in this study the vulnerability of the west wall of the...

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 ...