A Review of Operations Research in Mine Planning

Applications of operations research to mine planning date back to the 1960s. Since that time, optimization and simulation, in particular, have been applied to both surface and underground mine planning problems, including mine design, long- and short-term production scheduling, equipment selection, and dispatching, inter alia. In this paper, we review several decades of such literature with a particular emphasis on more recent work, suggestions for emerging areas, and highlights of successful industry applications.