Open-Pit Mine Production Planning and Scheduling: A Research Agenda

Abstract

Mining is a complex, expensive, yet lucrative business. Today’s open-pit mines are huge projects in Australia. To keep the projects profitable, planners and schedulers are under constant pressure to make mine plans that are as accurate as possible and optimize production at all stages, from mine to market. In general, two different systems are available for extracting material in the mining industries: the traditional truck and shovel (T&S) and the modern in-pit crushing and conveying (IPCC) systems. While T&S has been extensively studied by operations research (OR) community, there are, however, almost no studies for optimizing the operations in IPCC systems. Despite great advantages of IPCC systems, mining companies are often reluctant to use it, due to the lack of an optimum strategic plan that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the costs of IPCC systems. In most cases, industry is still relying on the judgement or best estimate of experienced personnel in strategic decision making. This is without any guarantee of optimality and will be refined manually through multiple time-consuming iterations. This chapter introduces IPCC to the OR community and points out the need for OR research. Subsequently, we will develop a research agenda that provides an apt ground to study this system.