Planning of the open-pit working edge positions by the periods of mining within the constraint programming paradigm

The work is aimed at solving the three-dimensional problem of finding the open-pit working edge positions by the periods of mining, taking into account the a priori specified productivity for the mineral and overburden. The proposed method uses a block model of a pit, where for each block its coordinates, the content of minerals in it, and the conditional initial value of the block are known. Also, a discounting function is set - a change in the total value of a block, depending on the period of its mining. The task is to find the distribution of blocks over mining periods that maximizes the total value of the blocks. Combinatorial search acceleration is achieved by representing a number of technological constraints in the form of global constraints.