— Open pit mine production scheduling (OPMPS) is a strategic decision-making problem that seeks to define the optimal sequence of material extraction and the flow of these materials within the mineral value chain (i.e. processing streams, stockpiles, and waste dumps) of an operation (Fig. 1).

 — The key objective of strategic geometallurgy is to create iterative models to guide mining and processing decisions in the context of metal production and cash flows.

 — The surface mine planning and optimisation techniques such as block modelling, pit optimisation, scheduling, stockpiling and reconciliation that are and have been applied at an existing iron ore open pit operation are discussed in this report.

A block model is a simplified representation of an ore body and its surroundings that can be thought of as a stack of computer-generated "bricks" that represent small volumes of rock in a deposit (ore and waste). Each "brick", or cell, contains estimates of data, such as element grade, density and other

 — An ideal mining system constitutes of a mine, ore processing stream and metal refinery, which are optimally planned to avoid losses (Githiria et al. 2016). Modelling of these optimisation problems related to mining operations follows the …

 — Six machine learning algorithms, namely the random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), multi-layer perceptron neural networks (MLP neural nets), classification and regression tree, k-nearest neighbors, and M5Tree model, were developed and investigated to estimate ore production at a limestone open-pit mine in South Korea.

Modelling Ore Behaviour in Mineral Processing INTRODUCTION In their general introduction to geometallurgy, Frenzel et al. (2023 this issue) provide a broad overview of the two key processes occurring in most mineral processing plants, comminution and mineral separation, as well as their respective goals.

Mineralogy-based geometallurgical modelling employs quantitative mineralogical information, both on the deposit and in the process. The geological model must describe the minerals present, give their chemical composition, report their mass proportions (modal composition) in the ore body and describe the ore texture.

improved mining techniques to minimise ore loss and dilution, and identifying ways to increase metal recoveries during the extraction processes. The ability to measure and analyse data in this way enables an operator to design and implement process improvements across the entire mining value chain.

The work provides us-ers with easily run Excel models, tailor-made for specific process designs, using Visual Basic macros and graphical output, to explore the implications of decision parameter choice, under a range of possible operating conditions and …