Schedule Optimisation of Large Complex Mining Operation

摘要

Mine planners must often develop strategies to deal with multi-element ores, feeds to multiple processes, stockpiles, and specific ore blends. These strategies must maximise the business value, ensuring that realistic environmental, mining, processing, marketing and financial constraints are imposed. As more of these strategies and constraints are incorporated into the optimisation process, the solution time can quickly limit the level of 'optimisation' a study achieves. This paper reviews an efficient mine schedule optimisation technique which expands the range of scheduling strategies that can be simultaneously optimised. The interaction between cut-off grade, production rate, reserve sequencing, stockpiling, ore properties and mill operating parameters are considered in the optimisation. Principles are discussed in this paper which have been successfully extended to scheduling large, complex mining operations. Several examples are then presented to show how multi-policy optimisation can be applied to wide range of situations.