Short-term production scheduling in open pit mines with shovel allocations over continuous time frames

Short term mine production scheduling is essential to attain the desired capacity utilization of equipment, meet blending targets and adhere to the strategic schedules. Although, several optimization models exist in the literature, size and complexity remains a problem which poses a limitation to solve and generate the schedules at smaller resolutions for larger time frames. This paper presents a short term production scheduling model which allocates shovels over continuous time frames, thus controlling the model size from growing with the resolution. This approach also models the mine operating environment in a more representative way to create practical and achievable schedules. A verification study of the model is presented in this paper using an iron ore mine case study. A comparison of solutions in the pareto optimal space also justifies the goal optimization as an efficient approach to attain best outcomes from among multiple conflicting objectives of the problem.