Short-term underground mine planning: a review

Abstract

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in short-term underground mine planning, which is critical for future mining activities. According to the literature, the research is conducted in the categories of mathematical programming optimization and discrete event simulation. Mathematical programming aims at minimizing an objective with the functionality of cost, makespan, deviation from a specific target such as tonnage and fleet management and scheduling. Mining simulation is widely applied in case of short-term mine planning, mostly based on modelling the internal mining process and parameters and on implementing a model for different case studies. A comprehensive review is provided for the aforementioned issues, commercial software packages and programming languages. Finally, research limitations and future area investigation are discussed. The studies reveal a deficiency of research based on the type of mining methods and incorporation of uncertainties.