Long- and short-term production scheduling at LKAB’s Kiruna mine

Abstract

LKAB’s Kiruna mine is an underground sublevel caving mine located above the Arctic circle in northern Sweden. The iron ore mine currently uses a long-term production scheduling model to strategically plan its ore extraction sequence. In this chapter, we describe how we modify this model to consider several different levels of time resolution in the shortversus long-term, and provide guidance for increasing model tractability. We demonstrate numerically the increase in schedule quality and model tractability as a result of these modifications.