ABSTRACT
Short-term production scheduling of a mine determines the extraction sequence of blocks on a shorter scale of months, weeks or days. It models the mine operations in great detail and it typically aims to meet the quality and quantity targets of production in each period. Over the years, a number of models have been developed to optimize the short-term production scheduling problem of the mines. However, most of these models were developed for single mines. This paper presents a model to optimize short-term production schedules of mineral value chains comprising of multiple mines. In addition, a genetic algorithm based heuristic approach has been presented to tackle industrial scale instances of short-term production scheduling problem which exact solution techniques cannot solve within a reasonable amount of time. Computational experiments suggest that the presented approach is a promising way to handle complex industrial scale instances of short-term production scheduling problem.
