Title: A new heuristic memory-based simulated annealing approach applied to mine production scheduling problem

Authors: Yuksel Asli Sari; Mustafa Kumral

Addresses: Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, McGill University, 3450 University Street, Montreal, QC, Canada ' Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, McGill University, 3450 University Street, Montreal, QC, Canada

Abstract: Mine production scheduling serves to maximise the net present value of a mine by solving three interconnected sub-problems: a) extraction sequence of mining blocks; b) ore-waste discrimination; c) production rates. Even though potential of scheduling is well-recognised, some issues have not been resolved: 1) the sub-problems given above are solved in a sequential fashion rather than simultaneously that leads to sub-optimality; 2) the number of decision variables and constraints can easily be over millions. In this paper, a notion of memory is introduced into simulated annealing (SA) to solve such a large problem efficiently. A new heuristic memory is added to SA such that better search results are obtained faster. At each iteration, the heuristic and the objective function are recorded. If their correlation is high, heuristic is also incorporated into the objective function. A case study demonstrated the proposed method performs faster than the original simulated annealing algorithm.

Keywords: simulated annealing; mine production scheduling; mine planning; heuristic memory; mining industry; extraction sequences; mining blocks; ore-waste discrimination; production rates.

DOI: 10.1504/IJADS.2016.081393

International Journal of Applied Decision Sciences, 2016 Vol.9 No.4, pp.348 - 365

Received: 20 Apr 2016
Accepted: 05 Oct 2016
Published online: 06 Jan 2017 *

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