Robust Planning for an Open-Pit Mining Problem under Ore-Grade Uncertainty

Open-pit mining production planning is a risky problem: operation costs are considerable, many parameters are inherently subject to uncertainty and, moreover, the mining operation can only be done once. In this work we address uncertainty in the ore-grade, where we only assume the availability of an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inElectronic notes in discrete mathematics Vol. 37; pp. 15 - 20
Main Authors Lagos, Guido, Espinoza, Daniel, Moreno, Eduardo, Amaya, Jorge
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 01.08.2011
Subjects
Open-pit mining
Risk-averse optimization
Robust Optimization
Robust Optimization
Risk-averse optimization
Open-pit mining
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Summary:Open-pit mining production planning is a risky problem: operation costs are considerable, many parameters are inherently subject to uncertainty and, moreover, the mining operation can only be done once. In this work we address uncertainty in the ore-grade, where we only assume the availability of an i.i.d. sample of the joint distribution of ore-grade in the blocks of the mining site. We consider an open-pit mining problem involving extraction and processing decisions under capacity constraints. We apply and compare the risk-hedging performance of three approaches for optimization under uncertainty: Value-at-Risk, Conditional Value-at-Risk and a proposed robust optimization approach. The latter is shown to have desirable risk-averse properties. Computational results on one small size vein-type mine are shown.
ISSN:1571-0653
1571-0653
DOI:10.1016/j.endm.2011.05.004