Generation of a Monthly Mining Development Plan for Underground Mines Using Mathematical Programming

Abstract

Mine development is necessary to enable all required infrastructures to begin production in a mine sector or to give support for the productive sector. The development plan is subject to constraints, making the planification process highly time and computationally consuming. From a mathematical point of view, this is an optimization problem in which the objective function is the execution time of mine development, considering a given time horizon. In this paper, a methodology is proposed, which allows to resolve the time optimization problem for underground mine development, minimizing the execution time and considering operational, geotechnical, and deadline constraints. The case study is based on an underground mine extracted by panel caving method. A mathematical model is based on mixed-integer programming in which several activities are scheduled and sequenced in a given time horizon, independent of the extraction method. The results show an executable development plan within a 12-month period fulfilling each of the restrictions raised in the problem. The proposed methodology considerably reduces the time of the development plans allowing to consider different scenarios before the final execution plan is selected.