An application of an open pit mine production scheduling model with grade engineering

Abstract

Grade Engineering (GE) refers to a range of pre-concentration techniques and operating methods to improve mineral feed grades by early rejecting low uneconomic materials prior to energy and cost intensive processing. While inclusion of a GE plant within the mineral value chain may assist the development of realistic strategic mine plans, the existing models that offer solution to the open pit production scheduling problem ignore the important and relatively new GE techniques. This paper presents an overview of a new mathematical formulation that optimizes annual production scheduling of an open pit mining operation with Grade Engineering subject to a set of operational and technical constraints. The computational results show that the proposed method outperforms than the existing models without GE plant.