PLANNING OF OPEN PIT MINES THROUGH STOCHASTIC OPTIMIZATION

Mine planning processes in open-pit deposits in Colombia, have been performed using deterministic tools, which excludes the assessment of risks and uncertainties in the mining business and in some cases fail to maximize the benefits in monetary terms. We need to develop alternative models for mine planning to improve the competitiveness and productivity in terms of the following factors: Increased mine of life-LOM; Extraction and exploitation of lower quality resources; Obtaining more benefits from the mining business; Reduced risk and uncertainty in the mine planning process, among others. Within the planning processes of mineral mining in the open pit mine in Colombia there is no evidence of the use of tools for decision making under uncertainty scenarios that allow these processes to perform metaheuristic techniques such as simulated annealing; genetic algorithms; tabu search; neural networks; among others. In this paper we focus on genetic algorithms and its application to mine planning for open pit. This paper is intended to serve as the basis for a stochastic approach to mine planning, from the genetic algorithm and its implementation is carried out in companies that exploit the mineral resources in Colombia, with the aim of improving the production chain mining process.