Manuscrito
Optimal Economic Envelope of Joint Open-Pit and Underground Mines
Autor
Julio-Fernández, Cecilia Alejandra
Amaya-Arriagada, Jorge Guillermo
Morales, Nelson
Lamghari, Amina
Institución
Resumen
The costs and complexity of the mine operation increase as extraction in an open pit mine
progresses, making the use of underground methods more and more appealing. A natural
question is, therefore, what are the boundaries of the open pit and underground sections of the
mine that maximize economic value for the company?
A few attempts have been made to answer this question, from sequential: open-pit first and then
underground mining the remaining material, to complex simultaneous scheduling of both mines at
different aggregation levels. The main focus of these works has been determining the optimal
transition time.
In this work, we focus more on the definition of the economic envelope of the mines rather than
time. Our motivation for this is the robustness of this decision. For this we present a model and
algorithm to jointly determine the optimal envelopes of the open pit and underground sections of
the mine. 11