Open-Pit Production Scheduling - Suggestions for Lagrangian Dual Heuristic and Time Aggregation Approaches

• Open-pit production scheduling deals with the problem of deciding what and when to mine from an open-pit, given potential profits of the different fractions of the mining volume, pit-slope restrictions, and mining capacity restrictions for successive time periods. We give suggestions for Lagrangian dual heuristic approaches for the open-pit production scheduling problem. First, the case with a single mining capacity restriction per time period is considered. For this case, linear programming relaxations are solved to find values of the multipliers for the capacity restrictions, to be used in a Lagrangian relaxation of the constraints. The solution to the relaxed problem will not in general satisfy the capacity restrictions, but can be made feasible by adjusting the multiplier values for one time period at a time. Further, a time aggregation approach is suggested as a way of reducing the computational burden of solving linear programming relaxations, especially for largescale real-life mine problems. For the case with multiple capacity restrictions per time period we apply newly developed conditions for optimality and nearoptimality in general discrete optimization problems to construct a procedure for heuristically constructing near-optimal intermediate pits.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Open-pit mining

mine scheduling

Lagrangian relaxation

maximum flow

time aggregation

MATHEMATICS

MATEMATIK

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

ovr (subject category)