A solution approach for optimizing long-and short-term production scheduling at lkab’s kiruna mine

Abstract We present a mixed-integer program to schedule long-and short-term production at LKAB's Kiruna mine, an underground sublevel caving mine located in northern Sweden. The model minimizes deviations from monthly preplanned production quantities while adhering to operational constraints. B...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Michael A Martinez, Alexandra M Newman
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2011
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.1078.2084
http://inside.mines.edu/%7Eanewman/journal_article8.pdf
Description
Summary:Abstract We present a mixed-integer program to schedule long-and short-term production at LKAB's Kiruna mine, an underground sublevel caving mine located in northern Sweden. The model minimizes deviations from monthly preplanned production quantities while adhering to operational constraints. Because of the mathematical structure of the model and its moderately large size, instances spanning a time horizon of more than a year or two tend to be intractable. We develop an optimization-based decomposition heuristic that, on average, obtains better solutions faster than solving the model directly. We show that for realistic data sets, we can generate solutions with deviations that comprise about 3%-6% of total demand in about a third of an hour.