Study on the Optimized Production Scheduling of Polymetallic Mines Considering the Vehicle Routing Problem

The reasonable scheduling of production processes in polymetallic mines is crucial for comprehensively utilizing mineral resources and ensuring economic benefits. The simultaneous mining of high- and low-grade ores, scientific ore transportation, and reasonable ore blending are prerequisites for stable polymetallic beneficiation and guaranteed concentrate quality. Therefore, establishing an optimization model for this problem and designing algorithms to solve it have great significance in the theory of optimization algorithms and in production practices for polymetallic mining enterprises. Based on the production processes of polymetallic mines, this paper establishes a two-stage optimization model for mining, ore transportation, and ore blending production scheduling considering the vehicle routing problem in a truck transportation process. An improved imperialist competition algorithm is designed to solve the vehicle routing problem for the second stage model. The computational results show that the proposed algorithm reduces ore transportation costs by no less than 0.83% compared to other algorithms, which translates to an annual cost saving of at least 100,000 yuan for the mining enterprise of this case study. By solving the model, the Pareto front between unit cost and total grade fluctuation in the entire production process, as well as the rules for making decisions on production scheduling schemes, are obtained. The relevant numerical results of the production scheduling scheme corresponding to the “inflection point” on the final Pareto front are also provided.