EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A continuous framework for open pit mine planning

Felipe Alvarez (), Jorge Amaya (), Andreas Griewank () and Nikolai Strogies ()

Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, 2011, vol. 73, issue 1, 29-54

Abstract: This paper proposes a new mathematical framework for the open pit mine planning problem, based on continuous functional analysis. The main challenge for engineers is to determine a sequence of nested profiles maximizing the net present value of the mining operation. The traditional models for this problem have been constructed by using binary decision variables, giving rise to large-scale combinatorial and Mixed Integer Programming problems. Instead, we use a continuous approach which allows for a refined imposition of slope constraints associated with geotechnical stability. The framework introduced here is posed in a suitable functional space, essentially the real-valued functions that are Lipschitz continuous on a given two dimensional bounded region. We derive existence results and investigate qualitative properties of the solutions. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2011

Keywords: Mine planning; Continuous optimization; Calculus of variations; Functional analysis; 49J300; 80M50; 49J50; 90C26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00186-010-0332-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:mathme:v:73:y:2011:i:1:p:29-54

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/00186

DOI: 10.1007/s00186-010-0332-3

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematical Methods of Operations Research is currently edited by Oliver Stein

More articles in Mathematical Methods of Operations Research from Springer, Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR), Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:mathme:v:73:y:2011:i:1:p:29-54