Determine optimal pit limit using artificial bee colony algorithm

In the past, various methods have been proposed to determine the ultimate pit limit. Among the methods, can be pointed out artificial intelligence-based methods such heuristic algorithms, genetic, ants and colony competition. Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is one of the most powerful heuristic algorithms inspired by the cumulative life of bees. In this paper, first, a hypothetical example of the life of the bees was described to find the source with the highest number of nectar by this algorithm. Then, a method based on the bee algorithm is proposed to determine the ultimate pit limit, and to examine its performance, a two-dimensional example is described step by step. In this example, it was found where in cases, the moving cone can not find the optimal solution for determining the ultimate pit limit, the ABC is well suited for its solution.Then, this algorithm was used to determine the ultimate limit of Sungun mine with a number of 120*100*45 blocks. To validate the problem solving of determining the ultimate limit using the ABC algorithm, graph theory and moving cones was used. The results show that the difference in income from the determination of the ultimate pit limit using the ABC algorithm from the moving cone and the graph theory is 1.6% and 12.3%, respectively.