In the scope of the project named CAPUME II (EEC BRITE/EURAM
contract - project MA2M-CT90,-0042(SMA)) for the development of an
integrated mine planning system for underground mines, two of the main
tasks were the development of a short-term mining planning procedure
(module) and a numerical simulator of the mineral processing plant of
Pirites Alentejanas - PA. The short-term mining planning module defines the mining sequences
by solving a constrained minimisation problem. The ore grade variability
is the objective function subject to the geometrical constraints of the
mining method and to the maximum of `internal blending'. The
optimisation problem is solved by applying a dynamic programming
algorithm. The plant simulator is an essential tool of the planning system allowing
the preview of metal grades/recoveries of copper, lead and zinc of
concentrates streams, given the corresponding metal assays of the
run-of-mine ore, defined by the short-term mine planning module. This way, the management can plan the short-term mining
operations (the weekly sequence of exploration blocks and the
internal planning) in order to fulfill given required conditions,
based on a shipment schedule and on a purchaser's formula. In this paper, after a short description of the short-term mining
planning module and of the simulation package named SIMUL, a
synthesis of the main model development steps and the results of
some simulation runs are presented and discussed.