doi 10.1287/inte.1030.0059 ©2004 INFORMS Implementing a Production Schedule at LKAB’s Kiruna Mine

• Main Authors: Mark Kuchta, Alexandra Newman, Erkan Topal
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Kiruna; Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.566.1623; http://inside.mines.edu/~anewman/Kiruna_interfaces.pdf

LKAB’s Kiruna Mine, located in northern Sweden, produces about 24 million tons of iron ore yearly using an underground mining method known as sublevel caving. To efficiently run the mills that process the iron ore, the mine must deliver planned quantities of three ore types. We used mixed-integer programming to schedule Kiruna’s operations, specifically, which production blocks to mine and when to mine them to minimize devia-tions from monthly planned production quantities while adhering to operational restrictions. These production schedules save costs compared to schedules produced manually by meeting desired production quantities more closely and reducing employee time spent on preparing schedules. Key words: production and scheduling: applications. History: This paper was refereed. Planning an underground mine is a complex pro-cedure consisting of five stages: (1) determining the geometry and grade (or quality) distribution of the ore body, (2) deciding how to mine the ore, that is, by surface or underground mining, (3) designing the mine infrastructure, that is, how to lay out the mine to mine and retrieve ore efficiently, (4) plan-