New Challenges in Scheduling Theory

October 21 - 27, 2012 --- Centre CNRS "La Villa Clythia", Frejus, France

Optimised Medium-term Rail Planning at a Major Iron Ore Producer of Australia

SpeakerGaurav Singh

In supply chains, medium term plans (2 weeks to 2 year) are used to maximise throughput and identify bottlenecks. In mineral supply chain the plan not just provides number of trains to be sent to every mine in every period but is also essential for various other planning operations like crew-scheduling, production planning at mines and scheduling of maintenance. This plan needs to observe constraints like port and rail maintenance requirements, production plans, and capacities of fleet, dumping, loading and stockyard. The plan also needs to consider grade qualities, which introduces non-linear constraints as the quality depends on the mixing ratio of ore from different sources. In this paper we present MINLP model that is being used for such a planning at a major iron ore producer of Australia. The model has also reduced total planning time from 5-6 hours of manual planning to 30 minutes of cpu.