IJPAM: Volume 92, No. 4 (2014)

A DUALITY-BASED DERIVATION OF
THE MAXIMUM FLOW FORMULATION OF
THE OPEN-PIT DESIGN PROBLEM

Henry Amankwah$^1$, Torbjörn Larsson$^2$, Björn Textorius$^3$
$^1$Department of Mathematics & Statistics
University of Cape Coast
GHANA
$^{2,3}$Department of Mathematics
Linköping University
SWEDEN


Abstract. The open-pit design problem is to decide which ore in a deposit to mine in order to maximize profit, subject to constraints on mining precedence. After discretizing the volume of the deposit, the open-pit design problem can be formulated as a maximum flow problem in a capacitated network, as shown by J.-C. Picard in 1976. His derivation is based on a restatement of the problem as a quadratic binary program. We give an alternative derivation of the maximum flow formulation, using only linear programming duality.

Received: November 21, 2012

AMS Subject Classification: 90C10, 90C35, 90C90

Key Words and Phrases: open-pit mining, maximal closure, maximum flow

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DOI: 10.12732/ijpam.v92i4.1 How to cite this paper?

Source: International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics
ISSN printed version: 1311-8080
ISSN on-line version: 1314-3395
Year: 2014
Volume: 92
Issue: 4
Pages: 449 - 457

CC BY This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY).