Application of Particle Swarm Optimization to the Open Pit Mine Scheduling Problem

This paper proposes a procedure for applying Particle swam algorithm (PSO) to long term production scheduling problem of the open pit mines, which is a large combinatorial optimization problem involving large datasets and multiple hard and soft constraint. Constraint programming technique have been used to produce the initial population of solutions (particles) and then the continuous version of the PSO algorithm have been implied to search the feasible solution space for finding better solutions. The performance of different variants such as global, local and Multistart of the PSO algorithm have been studied and the results are presented.