Cement industry is mainly based on the raw materials extracted from quarries such as limestone, clay,

and so on. Today, with the development of cement production, quarry mining is facing with several
challenges including: Strict quality requirements, Limited resources, increasing number of constraints,
tighter planning schedule, and dynamic corrective actions. Those challenges practically make practically
it difficult to mine planner to meet the objectives of quarry management effectively.

Nowadays, sustainable development of raw materials is the key focus of cement industry and mining
industry. For any mining company, the primary of their business is to sustainably deliver maximum value
to their shareholders, communities and governments at different levels. Hence, long term plan is
becoming more and more important. However, in practice, long term quarry production planning often
is ignored. Work force and managers are mentally locked to existing short term practice. Furthermore,
there is a little coordination between planning and operation. Planning and scheduling are done mainly
based on little knowledge about objectives. Knowledge about the mines and deposit at organization level
is wasted.

Let’s me introduce you a simple definition of mine planning. Given a surface mine like this, to extract the
ore from the Earth, you need to do a series of operations. However, those operations are complex and
expensive works. Hence, you need an optimal strategy. We define it as a mine planning. It is often
divided into three stages: long, medium and short term plans or smaller.

A basic task in mine planning is production scheduling problem in which mine planner must determine an
optimal block extraction policy in order to maximize the net present value of the project. Generally, this
task must not violate the sequencing or technical constraints and the operational constraints.

Mine planning and production scheduling problems can now be efficiently solved by operations research
techniques, particularly mathematical programming. The main challenge for this approach is the size of
the problem. Hence, mine planning and production scheduling problems can be solved by two
approaches. The first one is heuristic approach which consists of three steps: ultimate pit limit, pushback
design and production schedule. This approach is very common in mining commercial software. The
second one is exact approach which solves globally the three steps. This approach is optimal but harder
and less tractable.

Therefore, our research focuses on two major objectives: Developing a new Mixed Integer Linear
Programming (MILP) model to solve the long term cement quarry production scheduling problem and
improve the tractability of production scheduling problem which means that we can solve the problem
using exact approach but in a reasonable time.

To achieve the objectives, we firstly prepare a number of different block models from different quarry
mining operations. After that, we apply the clustering technique to improve the tractability and
practicality of model. Mixed Integer Linear Programming is used to model the problem. Matlab (2016)
application was used as the programming platform to define mathematical model and call solvers to
solve the problem. Finally, two dataset from two quarries was used to verify the model.

As I said above, the main challenge in optimization is the problem size. One of the most popular
techniques to reduce the size of the problem is clustering. In this research, we will cluster or group the
blocks which have the similar properties into a group call clusters. First step, we calculate the similarity
index using the Gover’s distance due the appearance of both numeric and categorical data as you can
see in the example. Then, hierarchical clustering method was used to create the initial clusters. To be
used as mining units, we check and fix the continuity, shape and size of each cluster. This process can be
iterated several times.

We develop our mathematical model based on a conceptual mining model describing the quarry
operation. Raw materials like limestone, clay, and so on are extracted from the quarries and then mixed
together or with corrective or additive materials from the market to meet the quality requirements in
cement manufacturing.

As you can see, we model our problem using MILP with the objective of minimization of raw mix
development cost. Our model consists of constraints that describe the cluster extraction precedence,
mining capacity and quality requirements. However, the model is sometimes difficult to solve optimally.
We developed a relaxation model that divides the decision variables into two different ones. One can be
used to control the production and other to control the precedence.

Next step, we developed, implemented and verified the proposed model in Matlab environment. Firstly,
we formulated the model in the form as you can see here. Then, we call the solvers to solve this
formulation with the stopping condition is the gap between the linear optimal objective and the
objective we got. When the gap gets smaller we can have a better result.

Before running the optimization model, we implement a data reduction technique to reduce the number
of variables that help the model running faster. In a simple way, we determine the earliest start time and
latest start time for each clusters based on the maximum and minimum production constraints.

In the next sections, we implement the clustering algorithms and mathematical formulations on a small
data set in order to illustrate how the algorithms work and how cluster affect the mathematical
formulation and its run time. A limestone deposit has three types of rock types, classified as marl,
marginal limestone and high grade limestone. Usually, marginal limestone will be removed over the HG
limestone layer.

In this case, we aimed to generate a practical schedule taking account into the production scheduling
parameters as you can see.

Because of the large problem size, we applied the clustering techniques to group the blocks into mining
clusters. We employed various cluster size to understand how the size of cluster affecting the quality of
cluster and optimization. Generally, increasing the cluster size will decrease the quality of clustering by
lowering the rock homogenity and growing the variation of CaO grade in clusters.

The figure you see now is the annual quarry production over 20 years generated by our model. We tried
various cluster sizes to understand the effect of cluster sizes on optimization results. As you can see on
the table, the time to solve the problem reduces when the cluster size increases but the quality of the
result decreases.
Here are production schedule on different views. The production and the additive requirements are kept
within acceptable limits.

And the quality requirements are kept within acceptable limits.

Our model is also able to increase the reserve by optimization of low grade marl and marginal limestone.

In the next section, we are going to generate the production schedule for a large scale quarry deposit
with more than 60 thousands blocks. The deposit is characterized by four layers of soil, clay and laterite
covering the limestone.