Developing a tool for automatic mine scheduling

Abstract

Presented is an automated short-term scheduling for underground mines which is an important part of the overall mining process. The presented algorithm is a constructive heuristics applied for scheduling of the production cycles of a cut-and-fill mine. The goal of the heuristics is to minimize the finishing times for each task. To achieve this, the tasks as scheduled as early as possible. The automated schedules were validated at the New Boliden mine both in offline and online tests and now the algorithm is going through later steps of product development. The main result is the creation of high quality schedules, outperforming existing manual ones in terms of both computational time and quality. The auto scheduler was tested and compared to manual scheduling. The results show a 10% increase in ore production and produce always feasible schedules with respect to all operational limitations. Thereat, the automated algorithms take minutes versus hours for manual scheduling.