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A model for open-pit pushback design with operational constraints

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Abstract

Open-pit mines are surface excavations created to extract valuable material which, in most cases, is located near the surface. Pushbacks are connected regions of a mine with enough working area to support the mining operation over a defined period. Pushbacks designed without taking into consideration haulage ramps are defined here as semi-practical pushbacks. We introduce a new optimisation model for semi-practical pushbacks that accounts for operational conditions: minimum operational width and connectivity within the blocks that compose the pushbacks. Additionally, we propose an algorithm that uses a Sliding Window Heuristic, variable bounding, and other preprocessing routines to obtain solutions with less than 10% optimality gap for mining instances ranging between 30,000 to 50,000 blocks.

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Acknowledgements

We want to express our gratitude to anonymous referees on this paper. Their insightful comments led to significant improvements in the scope and content of the results presented.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mining Engineering, University of Chile, Tupper 2069, Santiago, Chile

    Juan L. Yarmuch

  2. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Marcus Brazil

  3. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Hyam Rubinstein

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Doreen A. Thomas

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  1. Juan L. Yarmuch
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  2. Marcus Brazil
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Correspondence to Juan L. Yarmuch.

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Yarmuch, J.L., Brazil, M., Rubinstein, H. et al. A model for open-pit pushback design with operational constraints. Optim Eng 24, 623–639 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11081-021-09699-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11081-021-09699-9

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