Simultaneous stochastic optimisation of mining complexes with equipment uncertainty: Application at an open-pit copper mining complex

A mining complex or mineral value chain is an integrated system composed of mines, stockpiles, waste disposal and tailings facilities, processing destinations and transportation, that leads to generating sellable products delivered to customers and/or the spot market. To deal with such a system, conventional approaches optimise the related components independently and sequentially, while ignoring the related uncertainties. This article extends the simultaneous stochastic optimisation of mining complexes, so as to incorporate equipment uncertainties in addition to supply uncertainty. The inclusion of multiple components and different sources of uncertainty empowers the optimisation to capitalise on the synergies between the different components of a mining complex, while also managing the related technical risk and maximising the net present value. An application at a copper mining complex demonstrates the applied aspects of the proposed approach that jointly considers supply and equipment uncertainty to generate life-of-asset production schedules with a 2% higher net present value, when compared to the results considering only supply uncertainty.