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

Chapter · January 2018

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-55914-8_16

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Open pit mine production planning and scheduling: A re-
search agenda
Mehran Samavati a*, Daryl Essam a, Micah Nehring b, and Ruhul Sarker a
a
School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South
Wales, Canberra, Australia
b
School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, University of Queensland,
Brisbane, Australia

Abstract

Mining is a complex, expensive, yet lucrative business. Today’s open pit

mines are huge projects in Australia. To keep the projects profitable, plan-
ners 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 paper 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.

Keywords: Open pit mine, production planning, large scale Scheduling, in-
pit crushing and conveying system
2

1. Introduction

Mining is a significant primary industry and contributor to economy, par-

ticularly in Australia. The tight profit margins under which these mines
operate and the nature of mineral markets require efficient ore removal
schemes to ensure that the mine makes money.

In general, two different systems are available for extracting material in

the mining industries: the traditional truck and shovel (T&S) and the mod-
ern 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.
The only studies in this area are by Rahmanour et al. (2014) and Konak
(2007); these studies, however, are generally about allocating a location to
the conveyors on which material is loaded to be carried out of the deposit
(in IPCC systems), and do not take into consideration the scheduling as-
pects of material extraction.

The open pit mine production scheduling problem (OPMPSP) in the tradi-
tional T&S system consists of scheduling the extraction of a mineral de-
posit that is broken into a number of smaller segments, or blocks, across a
horizon of several periods in order to maximize the total discounted profit
known as net present value (NPV) from the mining project subject to a va-
riety of operational constraints. A similar optimization problem exists in
the IPCC system. Even though the objective in both systems seeks to max-
imize NPV, introducing conveyors (in IPCC) into an open pit operation in-
troduces a number of additional sequencing and pit expansion constraints
that are not required in traditional T&S systems. These constraints mainly
relate to the geometric need for a fixed pit access location to accommodate
the conveyor which thus restricts possible production sequencing in the
deposit. This means that generating a schedule for extracting blocks is de-
termined based on the location of conveyors, while finding the best loca-
tion for conveyors is itself an optimization problem and can change the
schedule. These additional constraints add further complexity to an already
complex large scale OPMPSP.
 3

Many mining companies put in place a traditional operation, i.e., T&S,

simply because they are looking for low risk and early payback on their
investment. Mining specialists tend to believe that during the evaluation
stage of a project, engineers should compare the costs and weigh up the
benefits of an IPCC system to a traditional mining operation. However,
lack of an optimum strategic plan 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 de-
cision making. This is without any guarantee of optimality and will be re-
fined manually through multiple time consuming iterations. Therefore,
providing a strategic plan involving uncertainties and potential risks is
something that mining companies require in order to approach the IPCC
system more confidently. This paper discusses the benefits of IPCC sys-
tem, and points out the need for OR research. Subsequently, we will de-
velop a research agenda for the OR community to study this system.

2. IPCC system

IPCC systems come from a few decades ago, first appearing in Germany in
1956. They were first applied to transport material out of a limestone
quarry which was not possible by a truck and shovel operation due to the
floor conditions (Koehler, 2003). In the current economic and political
climate, high diesel prices, shortages of tyres for large off-highway trucks
and labour, and high carbon emissions have reduced the attractiveness of a
truck and shovel operation. While these factors are a limitation to the use
of a truck and shovel system, they can also be seen as an opportunity to
exploit an IPCC system for its reduced operating costs, severely reduced
labour requirements, minimal reliance on large tyres for off-highway
trucks, and decreased carbon emissions (McCarthy, 2011).

The benefits of an IPCC system revolve around operating expenses (Foley,

M., 2012). The costs for fuel, trucks, tires, labors and carbon emissions can
be significantly reduced if an IPCC system is installed.

In spite of these benefits, companies are still unwilling to use IPCC. One
of the reasons is the fact that there are some factors that must be consid-
ered to justify the replacement of trucks with IPCC configuration. These
factors, however, are totally related to the initial investment of the project,
4

which cannot be precisely known without having an optimal strategic plan.

For example, IPCC is capital intensive and requires a long-life operation in
order to benefit from the reduced operating expenses. This means that a
certain number of time periods (usually years) is required to pay back the
initial investment. However, lack of a precise estimation of the needed ini-
tial investment makes it difficult to estimate the number of these years. In-
vestments in a mining project need to incorporate planning over several
years. It must be known that, despite larger short-term capital expenses
compared to T&S, the IPCC operation will return the investment quickly
through lower operating costs.

Typically IPCC operating costs are lower than normal truck and shovel
operations; however, some factors, such as fuel prices, size of the mine,
materials mined, and the manpower required need to be analyzed and de-
termined for the full life of the orebody to optimize the profit. Due to the
lack of a methodology to obtain the best sequence of the extraction opera-
tions and an optimal schedule, these factors are analyzed based on strategic
plan that only comes from the judgement of experienced personnel in stra-
tegic decision making.

In addition, the inherent risks of unforeseen factors affect the predictability

of the operations. A well-developed strategic plan that takes into consid-
eration the potential risk, when optimizing operations, can minimize poten-
tial uncertainties.

Therefore, one additional topic in mining optimization relates to develop-

ing a methodology to make a strategic plan for the use of IPCC. One pos-
sibility is to expand on the methods already developed for T&S by carry-
ing out an initial investigation/development to add additional constraints
that produce optimal pit limits when taking into consideration the use of
IPCC systems. In the next section, we will introduce the potential research
areas that relate to optimizing mine projects’ operations with IPCC con-
figuration.

3. Research opportunities for the OR community

As discussed above, certain factors, such as the estimation of the initial in-
vestment and the needed equipment, require a strategic production plan
 5

when using IPCC systems. In fact, there are a variety of aspects that must
be optimized in order to develop such a plan. In this section, we introduce
these aspects to OR community.

Despite identical objective in both systems, that is maximizing NPV,

OPMPSP in the IPCC system differs from that of T&S due to the follow-
ing reasons:

1. IPCC uses three different conveyors – main ‘trunk’ conveyor, transfer

conveyor, and bench conveyor – instead of trucks to transfer material out
of the pit. Finding the best location to accommodate these conveyors is of
importance and must be considered alongside extraction scheduling.

2. There are new precedence relationships between the blocks, in addition

to the traditional precedence relationship in T&S.

3. The new precedence relationships between blocks vary depending on

the locations of conveyors that are a decision variable themselves.

Figure 1 shows the deepest level of a pit from a top view. Each square in-
dicates a block, and the grey shaded blocks represent those containing
valuable material, known as ore blocks.

Fig. 1. A graphical view of the positions of conveyors in IPCC systems.

6

In this figure, the transfer conveyor is placed in blocks 3, 4, 5, 8, and 12.

All these blocks must be extracted to accommodate the transfer conveyor.
Similarly, blocks 1, 2, and 3 (yellow shaded blocks) must be removed to
accommodate the flat section of the main ‘trunk’ conveyor. Note that the
remaining section of this conveyor (i.e., the sloped section as can be seen
in Figure 1) goes into the upper level of the orebody, and no more blocks
in this level need to remove for this conveyor.

The best location for these conveyors is itself a decision variable and must
be determined at the same time with scheduling the extraction. The third
conveyor, bench conveyor, is mobile and can move to different rows.

Changing precedence relationship between blocks is another aspect that

should be taken into consideration when performing the scheduling. To il-
lustrate this, we give an example on Figure 1. Assume that block 11 is se-
lected to be extracted. After removing this block, the extracted material are
poured in the bench conveyor and transferred through this conveyor to the
transfer conveyor, and finally to the main conveyor. This means that
blocks 10 and 9 must be extracted before block 11 to accommodate the
bench conveyor. Thus, blocks 9 and 10 are the predecessors of block 11.
However, this relationship may change by changing the location of either
the transfer or main conveyor. For example, suppose that the best location
for the transfer conveyor is selected to be the column starting with block 1,
i.e., blocks 1, 7, 10, 14 and 16. In this case, there are no predecessors to
block 11.

The preceding example describes one of the aspects in IPCC systems that
should be optimized. There are, however, other aspects that can be consid-
ered in order to develop a strategic plan for the entire project:

 Integrating the Metallurgical throughput/recovery relationship into

the optimal pit limit and/or scheduling process

 Incorporating stockpiling into the pit limit and/or scheduling proc-

ess (perhaps geological or market risk parameters)
 7

 Incorporating uncertainty/risk aspects into the pit limit / schedul-

ing process (perhaps geological or market risk parameters)

 Integrating waste dump scheduling (for encapsulating acid bearing

material) into the optimal pit limit / scheduling process

From a practical point of view, the first two aspects may be the most im-
portant ones to be considered. All these operational aspects also exist in
the traditional T&S extraction system; from an OR point of view, integrat-
ing waste dump scheduling has been the most difficult aspect in the tradi-
tional system and, in fact, there are still no efficient algorithms to address
this problem. The same may hold for the IPCC system, as incorporating
waste dump requires considering the storing of extracted material along-
side extraction scheduling.

4. Conclusion

In this paper, we introduced a new optimization problem to the OR com-

munity. The traditional version of this problem is known as long term open
pit mine production scheduling. This is a well-known optimization prob-
lem that has been considered by the OR community for a few decades.
However, a new modern system, i.e., IPCC, is available for extracting ma-
terial from mine orebodies, and this gives rise to the need for OR specialist
to modify the previous techniques applied to the traditional system so they
can be applied to IPCC.

We introduced the new extracting system in such a way that is straightfor-

ward for OR community to understand, and discussed the research areas
coming from this system. Optimising the operations of the modern extract-
ing system can lead to a several thousand dollar increase in the profit of a
company.

References

Foley, M, (2012). In-pit crushing: wave of the future. Australian Journal

of Mining, pp.46-53.
 8

Konak, G, Onur, A H, Karakus, D, (2007). Selection of the optimum in-pit

crusher location for an aggregate producer. The Journal of the Southern Af-
rican Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, 107, 161-166.

Koehler, F, (2003). In-pit crushing system the future mining option.

Twelfth International Symposium on Mine Planning and Equipment Selec-
tion, pp 371-37 (The Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Kal-
goorlie).

McCarthy, R J, (2011). In-Pit Crushing and Conveying: Fitting a Square

Peg in a Round Open Pit. Proceedings CIM Montreal 2011, (Canadian In-
stitute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum Montreal).

Rahmanpour, M, Osanloo, M, Adibee, N, AkbarpourShirazi, M, (2014).

An Approach to Locate an In Pit Crusher in Open Pit Mines. IJE
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