Short-term open-pit mine production scheduling with hierarchical objectives

Short-term mine scheduling in open-pit mines consists of meeting the objectives defined by the long-term mine production schedule. Short-term scheduling in open-pit mines has multiple hierarchical objectives to optimize. This work proposes an optimization methodology to generate a short-term open-pit mine production schedule optimizing multiple hierarchical objectives. For the generation of mine schedules, we propose an optimization model based on mixed-integer linear programming. This model considers the usual restrictions of mine sequencing and also takes into account both time and cost of movement between phases of each shovel. In order to optimize the multiple hierarchical short-term objectives, we apply the hierarchical and weighted sum methods in the proposed optimization model. We verify this methodology in a real open-pit mine case study. The results show that both methods generate short-term mine schedules optimizing the different short-term objectives.