Integration of commodity price uncertainty in long-term open pit mine production planning by using an imperialist competitive algorithm

Abstract

Production planning for an open pit mine is a procedure in which the ore blocks are assigned to different production periods in a way that leads to the highest net present value (NPV) subject to some operational and technical constraints. Incorporation of uncertainty in the input parameters makes this process much more complicated. In this paper we describe a new stochastic optimization procedure, based on the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA), for long-term production planning of open pit mines under conditions of commodity price or market uncertainty. The procedure involves generating simulated realizations of commodity price values and finding the solution by ICA. The proposed approach has been tested on a real-world copper mine and the results show that ICA could be efficiently applied to stochastic production planning of a real mine.