A Differential Evolution based approach for the production scheduling of open pit mines with or without the condition of grade uncertainty

Abstract Production scheduling of open pit mines seeks to define such a temporal flow of ore and waste materials from a mine that maximizes a project’s Net Present value (NPV), while satisfying different physical and operational constraints. To achieve this objective, different mathematical formulations have been proposed in the technical literature. However, solving these formulations for a real sized open pit mine could be extremely difficult and computationally challenging job. In order to make this job computationally tractable, different heuristic and metaheuristic techniques are commonly used. This paper presents the results of a study where a real valued population based metaheuristic technique known as Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm has been used with the aim to solve the production scheduling problem of open pit mines with low to moderate computational cost with or without the condition of grade uncertainty. Three different case studies revealed the capabilities and efficiency of DE algorithm by producing sufficiently good solutions of the said with moderate computational cost.

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