The determination of the Ultimate Pit Limit (UPL) is the first step in the open pit mine planning process. In this stage that parts of the mineral deposit that are economic to mine are determined. There are several mathematical, heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms to determine UPL. The optimization criterion in these algorithms is maximization of the total profit whilst satisfying...

In themining optimisation literature, most researchers focused on two strategic-level and tactical-level openpit mine optimisation problems, which are respectively termed ultimate pit limit (UPIT) or constrained pit limit (CPIT). However, many researchers indicate that the substantial numbers of variables and constraints in realworld instances (e.g., with 50–1000 thousand blocks) make the CPIT’...