Long-term production scheduling optimization and 3D material mixing analysis for block caving mines

Abstract

Although some scheduling optimization models can be found in the literature, few of them include material flow and the resulting dilution. In this paper, a 3D mixing methodology is proposed to be incorporated into the production schedule model. To capture horizontal and vertical mixing, different scenarios are generated based on the particles that fall into a 3D cone of movement, CoM. The proposed model is a block caving scheduling optimizer, BCSO, which includes mixing in the optimization. The BCSO was tested on a real-case block caving mine with 424 drawpoints; also, a number of production schedules were generated for the same mine using PCBC GEOVIA software. Resulting production schedules show that the BCSO can improve the NPV of the project by 2% to 4% compared to the best case generated by PCBC.