Optimal Scheduling of Mining Operations

Industries in Asia are creating a strong demand for commodities like copper, nickel, aluminium and iron ore thus making mining industry a substantial contributor to the world economy. In response to the increasing demand, it is important to run the existing operations in maximum capacity. This paper focuses on maximizing the operational capacity and thus increasing the profit of a mining industry using mathematical optimization techniques. The demand of the mining products are in a specified quality window, deviation from which would cost the industry a predefined contractual penalty. Material of different quality specifications are available at the stockpile which are blended in order to meet with the demand thus making this problem a Generalized Pooling Problem (GPP). The mathematical model is essentially a Mixed Integer Non Linear Programming Model (MINLP). A Multi Operations Sequencing and a continuous time mathematical model is proposed to schedule the operations in the mining industry. In this problem we considered stockpiles, stockyards, and vessel hatch as three different stages, where the blending occurs in stockyard and vessel hatch before the product reaches the customer.