Please join us for this Friday’s Applied Mathematics and Statistics Colloquium Solving large-scale production scheduling problems in open pit and underground mining Alexandra Newman, Mechanical Engineering COLORADO SCHOOL OF MINES Friday, March 27, 2015 3:00 p.m. Chauvenet Hall, room 143 The open pit and underground mine block sequencing problems seek a discrete-time production schedule that maximizes the net present value of the orebody extracted given a mine design. An integer program discretizes the mine’s volume into blocks, imposes precedence constraints between blocks, and limits resource consumption in each time period. We show how: (i) an algorithm developed to solve the linear programming relaxation of multi-time period job scheduling problems, and (ii) a simple rounding heuristic can be used in our context. We provide numerical results for several real-world mines, and discuss extensions. Alexandra Newman received her BS in Applied Mathematics from the University of Chicago and her MS and PhD in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley. She served as a research assistant professor in Operations Research Department at the Navel Postgraduate School between 1998 and 2000. She has been on the faculty at the Colorado School of Mines since leaving the Naval Postgraduate School. Her research interests lie in optimization modeling, primarily as it is applied to energy mining, and military operations.. Please join us for refreshments at 2:45 p.m.