A heuristic for the open-pit mining operational planning problem with dynamic truck allocation

This work addresses open-pit mining operational planning with dynamic truck allocation. The problem involves determining the number of trips that each mining truck would do to each mining face, as well as deciding to which face the shovels are to be allocated, in order to meet the production and quality targets, and to achieve the best utilization of the available fleet. Due to the combinatorial complexity of the problem, it is solved using a heuristic algorithm based on the Iterated Local Search metaheuristic. The proposed algorithm is tested using real data and the results are compared against those produced by a LINGO-based mathematical programming model.

Open-pit mine operational planning; truck allocation; Iterated Local Search; variable neighborhood search; metaheuristics