Good morning !

Thank you professor for your kind introduction; it is my pleasure to be

here to share with you some interesting points in my Phd proposal concerning the
Optimization of short term scheduling for cement limestone quarry production.
My name is Trong, and I’m a Phd student from Vietnam
I am hoping to cover 8 parts in this morning
First, I’m going to introduce some overviews and background for my research.
and then we’ll move on to look at the research problem. In this part, I will try to explain
what I need to solve in my research.

In the third part, I’ll show you some gap in the research of production planning that I am
trying to fill up with my research.
The fourth part will help you to understand my aims in doing this research.

In the fifth part of my presentation I’ll put forward some ideas about the mathematical
model that I create to model the research problem.

I’ll also be offering some recommendations on how we can solve the research problem
then I’m going to suggest some possible measures to solve these difficulties in the sixth
part.

Afterthat, that’s a case study I intend to take to evaluate the research solution
and Finally, I will end up with the constributions of my research.

At the end of my talk, which will last about ten minutes, I’ll be happy to answer any
questions you may have.
OK, let’s start by looking at the introduction. Please look at the diagram of cement
manufacturing process.

The process begins from the quarries where what we call raw materials such as
limestone, clay and so on are mined. Amongs these raw materials, limestone is the most
popular because it contributes required quantity and quality of oxides of calcium, silica,
aluminum and iron such as Cao (Calcium oxide), Al2O3 (Alumium oxide), SiO2 (silicon
oxide), Fe2O3 (iron oxide). Furthermore, other raw materials as you can see in the table
are also used to replaced limestone.
As I said before, most cement plants depend on quarring or mining of limestone. So,
what is quarring method? Quarrying is actually an open pit mining method but is used
for extracting building materials and dimension stone. Usually steps in quarry operation
include clearing and stripping, drilling, blasting, loading, hauling and reclaimation.
Quarries are extracted from the top down in a series of horizontal layers of uniform
thickness called benches. Mining starts with the top bench and after a sufficient floor
area has been exposed, mining of the next player can begin. The process continues until
the bottom bench elevation is reached and the final quarry outline achieved. To access
the different benches a road or a ramp must be created. In addition, stable slopes must
be created and maintained during the creation and operation of the quarry. On some
benches that drilling, loading and hauling equipments works, the minimum bench width
is required.
Now, let’s me introduce some terms related to mining production scheduling. The
diagram show the first step of production planning is exploration when some drilling
programs and geotatstical techniques can be done to understand the ore deposit. For
the purpose of planning, the area of interest, including ore body and surrouding waste is
represented by several 3D prism called a block model. A block model consists of several
individual blocks in which different attributes such as density, rock type, grade are
included. This block model becomes an input to the quarry planning which may be
divided into two phases: long term planning and short term planning or scheduling. Long
term planning focuses on determining how natural resources are suitable for cement
production and the ability to produce profits of quarries, and so on. Next step, a series of
short term production scheduling is developed to achieve long term objectives.
OK, let’s come back the cement manufacturing process!

The raw materials are then tranported to crushing and sizing stations to break them into
required sizes.. Afterthat, raw materials are stored in stockpiles to uniform their quality
before moving to silos or other mixing devices for blending to develop a quality
requirements for clinker production. Usually, raw materials from quarries can not ensure
the quality requirements so that correctives such as bauxite or laterite are added more.
Finally, under some processing processes such as burning, grinding, cement products will
be produced.
Now we will see the blending requirements in cement manufacturing. The primary
requirement for developing an acceptable raw mix is a source of calcium oxide CaO. Raw
mix and fuels introduced into the cement kiln for manufacturing of cement also contain
some undesirable components. Such components, if present above the defined levels of
concentration, may hinder the efficiency of manufacturing process. Magnesium
compounds such as magnesia (MgO) are the most familiar of these. At low levels of
concentration, the role of magnesia as fluxing agent is beneficial; however, as the
concentration increases 3%, it becomes an impurity as it causes expansion/disruption of
concrete. Similarly, the alkali content shall be kept at less than 1% for regular quality
cement and less than 0.6% for low alkali cement.. Secondary raw materials are required
to achieve a balance of silica (SiO2), alumina (Al2O3), and iron (Fe2O3). Silica ratio (SR),
lime saturation factor (LSF) and alumina ratio (AM) are indices presented in equations
(1), (2) and (3) which help in achieving the balance of main oxides. Upon complete
burning of the raw mix in cement kiln, a synthetic mineral mixture “clinker” is produced.
The clinker consists of alite (3CaO.SiO2) represented as “C3S”, belite (2CaO.SiO2)
represented as “C2S”, aluminate (3CaO.Al2O3) represented as “C3A”, and brownmillerite
(4CaO.Al2O3.Fe2O3) represented as “C4AF”. Being the most critical constituents of
clinker, percent content of C3S, C2S, C3A, and C4AF also provides balance of CaO, SiO2,
Al2O3, and Fe2O3 in raw mix.
So, that’s the brief introduction for my research. Let’s me draw this diagram again
describing more detail in mining raw materials at the quarry. Now you will see that
raw materials are mined from the blocks on quarry benches. So, production planning can
be made not at the benches as an usual but at mining blocks. As I said above, Limestone
quarries primarily contribute these desirable constituents for the development of raw
mix, however, in order to meet the stringent quality requirements of the cement plant, it
is mandatory to blend high and low-grade raw materials in the quarry and, if required,
with additives such as sandstone, fly ash, iron ore, clay, slate stone, etc.usually
purchased from the market. Consequently, an optimal quarry production plan must
ensure that limestone mined in a given period meets the quality/raw mixing constraints
with minimum supplying cost.
In addition, In cement operations, blending at stockpiles is done in short time horizon
(often a week or few months). Hence, short term production scheduling plays an
important role to achieve the quantity and quanlity requirements for stockpiles. Base on
the analysis I present above, the research problem raised is to optimize or minimize the
supplying cost of raw materials subject to quality, quantity and other mining constraints
and of course in short term period.
Let me move on the research gap part! we found some gaps that our research can fill up.
Firstly, the cement industry currently practices a manual interaction i.e. trial and error
approach using MS Excel spreadsheets to accomplish the short-range quarry production
planning and raw materials blending (Dagdelen and Asad, 2002). However,current
practice fails to evaluate alternative options and it also ignores the effects of block
precedence and sequencing that leads to a lack of coordination among varioussections
of the operation (Asad, 2008).
Secondly, The need to plan and operate limestone quarries with optimal production
planning has been acknowledged. However, with few exceptions, the greater part of
studies on production planning and blending of raw materials have been conducted with
a focus on open pit mining operations, primarily applied to the mining of metallic ores.
Thirdly, the input to the cement quarry production planning problem is different from
metallic ores due to the difference in block models. In open pit mining operations for
metallic ores, each block inside block model will be assigned an economic value based on
the cutoff to clarify where a waste or ore block. Whereas, in cement quarry operations
limestone reserves are divided into a number of mineable blocks and each block is
assigned a qualitative index in terms of percent content of each of the vital chemical
constituents required for cement production.
Hence, we’ll develop a new optimization model for short term cement quarry production
scheduling. A solution to solve the model will aslo creat because in many real cases,
commercial software cannot solve or the model can be felt into the NP-hard problem. To
evaluate our model and solution technique, a practical case study in Vietnam will be
applied.
Now, I will move on the method we apply for the research. A mathematical model will be
built based on information getting from the block model and other economic
parameters. Let’s see what the mathematical model look likes!
The model is created using Mixed Integer Programming in which each mining block is
assigned a binary value “1 or 0”. Value “1” means block cannot be mined in the period
and value “0” is otherwise. Quantity of additive used in the period will be a continous
variable.

The model contains two main parts. The objective is to minimize the supplying cost of
raw materials including mining cost and corrective cost. This objective must meet a
group of quantity constraints including machine capacity, mining production, quantity of
correctives availabe in the market and stockpile capactity to ensure the quarry
production cannot be excess. Besides, the model also can guarantee the quality of raw
material blending to produce clinker such as the chemical content, the silica, lime
saturation and alumina ratio as well as clinker constraint.
Because we create this model in short term so a real-life contraints need to add more.
First is the precedence constraint which is used to force the sequence of extracting blocks
must maintain the slope angle. Precedence constraint indicates that directly related
overlying blocks should be mined before extracting the target block. Directly related
overlying blocks or precedence relations for the target block are determined by applying
slope pattern. There are several slope patterns used to identify precedence relationships.
For example, let’s look closer to the figure of 1:5 pattern and 1:9 pattern. According to
this pattern, block 1,2,3,4,5 in level 1 must be mined first before mining the block 6 in
level 2 or similarly block 1 to 9 in level 1 must be mined first before mining block 10 in
level 2 for the pattern 1:9. Generally, if the block dimensions or stable slopes vary in
different directions or levels, then slope pattern may change.
Second mining sequencing constraint is to provide sufficient working conditions to the
mining equipments by ensure the minimum working space.

now you see that the difficulty of the problem will depend on the number of blocks and
the number of constraints. If they are too large, it is not east to solve by commercial
software in a reasonable time. Therefore, in the next part, I will try to find a solution to
solve the model.
The first step, we call it preprocessing in which we try to reduce the number of variables
in the problem and reduce the number of linear constraints as well as detect an
infeasible problem.
afterthat, we’ll sovle the linear programming problem with the same objective and
constraints as Mixed-Integer Linear Programming Definition, but no integer constraints.
we call it the LP relaxation. Following that, we try to tighten the LP relaxation including
tightening the bound, remove some redundant constraints, fix some integer variables
and determine the problem is feasible or not. we can use cut generation algorithm to
tighten more the LP relaxation bringing the solutions are closer to integers. Next step the
heuristics method try to find integer feasible solutions or in other words, try to find
solutions of LP problem satisfying integer constraints. Finally, we’ll use a method named
Branch and Bound to contruct a sequence of subproblems which gives a sequence of
upper and lower bounds for the solution. Based on these bound, we can search the
optimal solution.
Next part, we’re moving on the case study.

The proposed model and solution approaches have been implemented in the real case
study. The case study is a cement limestone quarry in Vietnam. The mine planning and
design are currently performed on the basis of a block model containing about 90,000
blocks. All blocks have same size, which is 30 by 30 by 15 meters. The long term planning
was done before to create 20 short term periods. Each period was one year. As you can
see in the picture, there is one of 20 planning periods containing nearly 8000 blocks.
Next pictures are 6-month scheduling blocks we hope to create after applying the model
and its solution.

My final part is in regard to the contributions of the research. To the best of our
knowledge, there are few studies which address the cement limestone quarry over a
short term scheduling . Our model consider simultaneously the quality, quantity as well
as mining sequencing. therefore, our first contribution is to Create a novel real-life short
term production scheduling model for cement quarries.
The second contribution of this study is to develop the efficient solution techniques to
solve large scale instance of this problem. According to the literature and our
investigations, the block sequencing problem is an NP-Hard problem which is intractable
for exact techniques for industry-scale instances of the problem.

Finally, our reseach will contribute to use properly and efficiently limestone resource.
OK. That bring us to the end of my presentation.
Thank you for listening.
I hope you found it interesting.
If anyone has questions I’ll be happy to answer them.