TY - JOUR
T1 - Barrick s turquoise ridge gold mine optimizes underground production scheduling operations
AU - Brickey, Andrea
AU - Chowdu, Akshay
AU - Newman, Alexandra
AU - Goycoolea, Marcos
AU - Godard, Raphael
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 INFORMS Inst.for Operations Res.and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
PY - 2021/3
Y1 - 2021/3
N2 - Mining operations determine a long-Term production schedule, often to maximize net present value. For a time horizon of between years and decades, optimization models seek the extraction times with monthly or yearly fidelity of three-dimensional, notional blocks of ore and waste within a deposit to satisfy spatial precedence constraints, as well as resource constraints on the amount of material extracted and sent to the mill. With algorithmic advances, as well as those in mine planning software and in hardware, we are able to solve instances with a decade-long horizon at daily fidelity. The resulting objective, repeatable, and defensible schedules inform production and maintenance supervisory decisions based on resource availability, that is, loaders, shovels, haul trucks, and mineral processors. We implement our solutions at the Turquoise Ridge underground gold mine in Nevada, United States. These solutions indicate more than a 2% increase in total ounces extracted over a decade while decreasing development footage by as much as 11% over the same time horizon. Furthermore, we are able to incorporate rules governing a shared resource and to evaluate binding versus nonbinding capacity constraints.
AB - Mining operations determine a long-Term production schedule, often to maximize net present value. For a time horizon of between years and decades, optimization models seek the extraction times with monthly or yearly fidelity of three-dimensional, notional blocks of ore and waste within a deposit to satisfy spatial precedence constraints, as well as resource constraints on the amount of material extracted and sent to the mill. With algorithmic advances, as well as those in mine planning software and in hardware, we are able to solve instances with a decade-long horizon at daily fidelity. The resulting objective, repeatable, and defensible schedules inform production and maintenance supervisory decisions based on resource availability, that is, loaders, shovels, haul trucks, and mineral processors. We implement our solutions at the Turquoise Ridge underground gold mine in Nevada, United States. These solutions indicate more than a 2% increase in total ounces extracted over a decade while decreasing development footage by as much as 11% over the same time horizon. Furthermore, we are able to incorporate rules governing a shared resource and to evaluate binding versus nonbinding capacity constraints.
KW - Integer programming applications
KW - Mine planning
KW - Production scheduling
KW - Underground mining
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104685082&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1287/INTE.2020.1063
DO - 10.1287/INTE.2020.1063
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85104685082
SN - 2644-0865
VL - 51
SP - 106
EP - 118
JO - INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics
JF - INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics
IS - 2
ER -