Stopes Layout and Production Scheduling Optimization in Sublevel Stoping Mining

• Author / Creator

  Basiri, Zeinab

• The economics of today’s mining industry is such that the major mining companies are increasing the use of massive underground mining methods. Follow to this attraction, mine planning in underground mining and its optimization have been considered more seriously in recent years. Two aspects of mine planning optimization in underground mining are stopes layout and production scheduling optimization. Few algorithms have been presented to optimize the stopes layout and stope production scheduling for underground mining; however, those are not able to provide an optimum solution. Most of the presented algorithms are heuristic so they cannot guarantee to achieve the optimum solution.
  The objective of this study is to present the mathematical formulations to find the optimum stopes layout and production scheduling in sublevel stoping method. The stopes layout and production scheduling optimization are applied based on the total blocks in the block model altogether ( LOT and SOT methods)and based on the separated levels of block model (LOL and SOL methods) to see the impact of leveling in the stopes layout and production scheduling optimization which has not been clarified in the previous researches.
  The proposed methodologies maximize the economic value (EV) to determine the stopes layout. The presented production scheduling algorithm maximizes the NPV over the life of mine by using the Binary Integer Programming (BIP) while honoring the constraints such as only one-time mining, stopes adjacency, the connection between mining the stopes and activation of levels, concurrent active levels, and the delay between activation of the levels. The methods have been applied to a block model to check the application of the model in real size problems. Achieved EV by LOT method is 4% higher than LOL method; however, the running time of LOT method is 418 times more than LOL method. Also, from the accessibility of production levels to all the stopes during mining point of view, LOL presented the practical stops layout. The NPV of SOT method is 22% higher than the NPV of SOL method; however, the running time of SOT method is 3.4 times more than SOL method.
  The main contributions of this research are determining the mathematical models with the optimum solution to create the optimal stopes layout and production scheduling by two methods and comparing the results of the methods. Considering the practicality of the models by defining the set of practical constraints suitable for sublevel stoping and paying attention to the constraints that were not considered in the previous works include concurrent active levels and the delay between activation of the levels are other important contributions.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Sublevel Stoping
  • Optimization
  • Production Scheduling
  • Stopes Layout

• Graduation date

  Fall 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3FQ9QN36

• License

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