Large-scale open pit production scheduling using Mixed Integer Linear Programming

Abstract

One of the main obstacles in using Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulations for open pit production scheduling is the size of the problem. The main objective of this paper is to present and implement a practical MILP formulation for open pit production scheduling problem. To reduce the number of binary integer variables in the formulation, we aggregate blocks into larger units referred to as mining-cuts. We also present the numerical modelling approach to setup the optimisation problem. Finally, we verify and validate the MILP production scheduler by a comparative case study against Whittle strategic mine planning software.