Intelligent production management in mining systems

This paper attempts to characterize the mining process and the principles of mine production management. It considers the integration of decision support and information technologies into new intelligent systems for mine production management. A case study is examined which considers the production planning and control procedures at an open pit copper mine. This is used to demonstrate an approach to short term planning based on optimizing profit, using spreadsheet software and linear programming. This work shows that with little cost and time, a spreadsheet tool can be developed in-house for more scientific and cost effective mine production management. Such tools enable more constraints to be considered and management performance to be evaluated