Production Scheduling for Strategic Open Pit Mine Planning: A Mixed-Integer Programming Approach

Production scheduling is a large-scale optimization problem that must be solved on a yearly basis by every open pit mining project throughout the world. Surprisingly, however, this problem has only recently started to receive much attention from the operations research community. In this article, O. Rivera, D. Espinoza, M. Goycoolea, E. Moreno, and G. Muñoz propose an integer programming methodology for tackling this problem that combines new classes of preprocessing schemes, cutting planes, heuristics, and branching mechanisms. This methodology is shown to compute near-optimal solutions on a number of real-world planning problems whose complexity is beyond the capabilities of preexisting approaches.