Planning for Mining Operations with Time and Resource Constraints

Abstract

We study a daily mine planning problem where, given a set of blocks we wish to mine, our task is to generate a mining sequence for the excavators such that blend-ing resource constraints are met at various stages of the sequence. Such time-oriented resource constraints are not traditionally handled well by automated planners. On the other hand, the remaining problem involves finding node-disjoint sequences with state-dependent travel times on the arcs, which are highly challenging for a Mixed-Integer Program (MIP). In this paper, we address the problem of finding feasible sequences using a combined MIP and planning based decomposition approach. The MIP takes care of the resource constraints,..