Multi-objective short-term production scheduling for open-pit mines: a hierarchical decomposition-based algorithm. Issue 12 (2nd December 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Blom, Michelle; Pearce, Adrian R.; Stuckey, Peter J.
• Is Part Of: Engineering optimization. Volume 50:Issue 12(2018)
• Page Start: 2143
• Page End: 2160
• Publication Date: 2018-12-02
• Subjects: Short-term open-pit production scheduling -- mixed-integer programming -- hierarchical decomposition; Engineering design -- Periodicals; Mathematical optimization -- Periodicals; 620.0042
• DOI: 10.1080/0305215X.2018.1429601
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-215X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article presents a novel algorithm for solving a short-term open-pit production-scheduling problem in which several objectives, of varying priority, characterize the quality of each solution. A popular approach employs receding horizon control, dividing the horizon into N period-aggregates of increasing size (number of periods or span ). An N -period mixed integer program (MIP) is solved for each period in the original horizon to incrementally construct a production schedule one period at a time. This article presents a new algorithm that, in contrast, decomposes the horizon into N period-aggregates of equal size . Given a schedule for these N periods, obtained by solving an N -period MIP, the first of these aggregates is itself decomposed into an N -period scheduling problem with guidance provided on what regions of the mine should be extracted. The performance of this hierarchical decomposition-based approach is compared with that of receding horizon control on a suite of data sets generated from an operating mine producing millions of tons of ore annually. As the number of objectives being optimized increases, the hierarchical decomposition-based algorithm outperforms receding horizon control, in a majority of instances.