A new search algorithm for finding candidate crusher locations inside open pit mines

Abstract

Nowadays, In-Pit Crushing and Conveying (IPCC) planning has been addressed as one of the hottest area of research in the mining engineering. Semi-mobile IPCC systems have had the most compatibility and coordination with the open-pit mining strategy. The existing open pit mine production planning problem gets more complex and intractable by concurrently optimizing the open pit mine production and IPCC planning. This is mainly because of the new successor blocks’ constraints due to the in-pit crushers. The more candidate locations are defined truly, the less complex the problem would be. This requires deploying efficient search procedures to find the true candidate locations. This paper presents a new search algorithm for defining the most practical and less involving opportunity cost candidates. As well, a new clustering technique was developed to aggregate the blocks within the same azimuth domains, pushbacks and benches. The algorithm searches among the aggregated blocks inside the ultimate pit limit and tries to select the best candidates considering a series of generic and specific rules. The aggregation technique and search algorithm were applied in an open pit copper mine. The results indicated that the ideas provide hopeful tools for defining the candidate points of semi-mobile PCC systems.