Mine Facility Location Selection in open-pit mines using a new multistep-procedure

摘要

Mine Facility Location Selection (MFLS) is one of the most common encountered problems associated with sustainable development in open pit mine planning.This paper addresses a multistepprocedure to be applied for MFLS.In the first step,the potential areas for the mine facilities are identified through a preliminary screening process with application of the Geographical Information System (GIS).In the second step,a number of discrete candidate sites are identified resulting in finding three to five sites for each facility.In the third step,environmental impacts of each location for each facility are assessed by determining the effect of a comprehensive set of impacting factors on various environmental components.Then,the MFLS problem is formulated and solved by a hub location problem model to minimize the total transportation costs between facilities.The final solution of this procedure,to select the most appropriate locations for mine facilities,not only is technically feasible but also minimizes the cost of the mining project and diminishes the environmental issues of mining activities.This approach was applied to Sangan iron open pit mine of Iran to select primary crusher,processing plant and tailing pond locations and the results are discussed in the paper.