Modeling of effective control of drawpoints in block caving and evaluation in production planning

Industrial development and their requirement for mineral caused the mines to put higher annual production capacities in their production plans. Large-scale production requires production planning that use the realistic and efficient operational objective and constraints into models. According to various effective parameters in the planning and their relation in the successful operation of block caving complicated the scheduling of such mines. In this study, by introducing drawpoints activity period constraints and the number of active drawpoints in each period of mine life is researched the control of the start period of drawpoints and the caving process in the mining area. For this purpose, the MILP model has been developed using MATLAB and solved in CPLEX software. Implementation of these models on 109 drawpoints on 13 periods of mine life showed that the proposed MILP models controlled drawpoints activity and maximize economic productivity. The resulted showed that the maximum difference in NPV calculated in different directions is 16%, so the models respected the objective function. The results of production scheduling for the drawpoint 65 showed that in SN direction start period was 1 and the lifetime 3 years, so 33% of its tonnage is drawn every year. However, in the NS, the start period was 8 and lifetime was 1 period; therefore, the activity period of the drawpoints related to the tonnage and grade and also the direction of caving.