Title: Mine production scheduling for poly-metallic mineral deposits: extension to multiple processes

Authors: Yuksel Asli Sari; Mustafa Kumral

Addresses: Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, McGill University, 3450 University St., Montreal, Canada ' Department of Mining and Materials Engineering, McGill University, 3450 University St., Montreal, Canada

Abstract: Mine planning focuses on solving a series of decision-making problems; namely, determination of productions rates, ore-waste discrimination and block sequencing. These problems are currently solved in a sequential way leading to sub-optimality. In this paper, a new two-stage mine production scheduling is proposed for poly-metallic deposits. Using a marginal cut-off and conventional block sequencing approach, a sub-optimal plan is firstly generated. This plan is then submitted to the second stage to discriminate ore-waste and sequence blocks concurrently using a meta-heuristics. To improve the results in the first stage, new solutions are generated using two configuration mechanisms: 1) randomly selected blocks from the list containing block to be re-classified are re-identified with a probability; 2) randomly selected blocks are swapped from one period to the other without violating access constraint. To test the proposed technique, two case studies were conducted. The results showed that the approach could be effectively used.

Keywords: mine production scheduling; Korobov algorithm; positional weights heuristics; simulated annealing; poly-metallic deposits; mining industry; mineral deposits; mine planning; marginal cut-off; block sequencing; productions rates; ore waste discrimination; metaheuristics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPS.2015.072107

International Journal of Planning and Scheduling, 2015 Vol.2 No.2, pp.134 - 153

Received: 07 Jul 2014
Accepted: 19 Feb 2015

Published online: 30 Sep 2015 *

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