Production scheduling at LKAB's Kiruna Mine using mixed-integer programming

摘要

LKAB's Kiruna Mine, located in northern Sweden, produces about 24 Mt/a (23.6 million ltpy) of iron ore using sublevel caving. For mill efficiency, the mine must deliver planned quantities of three ore products. Mixed-integer programming is used to schedule Kiruna's operations. Specifically, this involves determining which production blocks should be mined and when they should be mined to minimize deviations from planned production quantities while adhering to mining restrictions (e.g., sequencing). A new production-block database and a well-formulated mixed-integer programming model dramatically reduce the size of the original problem. In less than ten minutes, five-year schedules with time fidelity of months are generated.