Planning block-caving operations poses complexities in different areas such as safety, environment, ground control and production scheduling. The objective of this paper is to develop a practical optimisation framework for production scheduling of block-caving operations. A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation is developed, implemented and verified in the TOMLAB/CPLEX environment. In this formulation, the slices within each draw column are aggregated into selective units using a hierarchical clustering algorithm and the mining reserve is computed as a result of the optimal production schedule for each advancement direction. This paper presents a model application of a production schedule for 102 drawpoints with 3457 slices over 14 periods. The results show in order to obtain the maximum net present value (NPV), only 88% of the reserve is extracted. Also, the solving time for the presented method is 78 times faster than method without slice aggregation.
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