Application of a particle swarm algorithm to the capacitated open pit mining problem

Abstract

In the capacitated open pit mining problem, we consider the sequential extraction of blocks in order to maximize the total discounted profit under an extraction capacity during each period of the horizon. We propose a formulation closely related to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) where the genotype representation of the solution is based on a priority value encoding. We use a GRASP procedure to generate an initial population (swarm) evolving according to a particle swarm procedure to search the feasible domain of the representations. Numerical results are introduced to analyze the impact of the different parameters of the procedures. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.