Short-term planning for open pit mines: a review

This review examines the current state-of-the-art in short-term planning for open-pit mines, with a granularity that spans days, weeks or months, and a horizon of less than one to two years. In the academic literature, the short-term planning problem for open-pit mines has not been as widely considered as that for the medium- and long-term horizons. We highlight the differences between short- and longer term planning in terms of both the level of detail to which a mine site is modelled, and the objectives that are optimised when making decisions. We summarise the range of techniques that have been developed for generating short-term plans, capturing both mathematical programming-based methods and heuristic approaches using local-search and decomposition. We identify key challenges and future directions in which to advance the state-of-the-art in short-term planning for open-pit mines.