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...

Applications of operations research to mine planning date back to the 1960s. Since that time, optimization and simulation, in particular, have been applied to both surface and underground mine planning problems, including mine design, longand short-term production scheduling, equipment selection, and dispatching, inter alia. In this paper, we review several decades of such literature with a par...

In this paper, we present an integrated model to find the optimum size of blast block that uses (i) a multi-criteria decision-making method to specify the applicable size of the mineable block; (ii) a linear programming method for the selection of the blasted areas to be excavated and in deciding the quantity of ores and wastes to be mined from each one of the selected blocks. These two methods...

Short-term production plans are the basis for operational mine production schedules. They concentrate on making long-term mine plans operationally feasible. Furthermore, some variables such as ore grade and tonnage govern mine production systems and cause uncertainty in the supply of raw materials to the mills. Due to the quality variation of material, short-term production optimization is an u...

Recently, the mining industry has introduced renewable energy technologies to resolve power supply problems at mines operating in polar regions or other remote areas, and to foster substitute industries, able to benefit from abandoned sites of exhausted mines. However, little attention has been paid to the potential placement of floating photovoltaic (PV) systems operated on mine pit lakes beca...

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...

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...