Life-of-mine schedule from multiple pits: case study for the Tenke Fungurume mining district

Mining Engineering , 2011, Vol. 63, No. 8, pp. 39-47

Benito, R.; Sanner, G.; Cai, W.

This paper describes the development of a life-of-mine schedule (LOM) for one of the world's largest known sedimentary copper-cobalt districts located in the Katanga Province, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A particular feature of the Tenke Fungurume LOM schedule is the considerable number of pits/phases for scheduling, each competing to provide the best ore available to a capacity-constrained process facility. This paper discusses the LOM scheduling objectives and constraints, data preprocessing steps such as ore binning, block aggregation and clustering analysis as a scheduling aid, the mine scheduling approach and results and conclusions.