Integrated Production and Distribution Planning for the Iron Ore Concentrate

This paper studies the production and distribution planning problem faced by the iron ore mining companies, which aims to minimize the total costs for the whole production and distribution system of the iron ore concentrate. The ores are first mined from multiple ore locations, and then sent to the corresponding dressing plant to produce ore concentrate, which will be sent to distribution centers and finally fulfill the customers' demands. This paper also tackles the difficulty of variable cut-off grade when making mining production planning decisions. A mixed-integer programming model is developed and then solved by a Lagrange relaxation (LR) procedure. Computational results indicate that the proposed solution method is more efficient than the standard solution software CPLEX.