In a typical open pitmine theUPLmay contain thousands
to millions of blocks that have to be scheduled over a
time horizon typically ranging from 5 to 30 periods or
may be more; the resulting integer formulation may contain
thousands to millions of integer variables and constraints,
which may be extremely difficult and expensive to solve. For
instance, defining production schedule for a small open pit
mine containing 10000 blocks which needed to be scheduled
over 10 periodsmay require 1,000,00 binary decision variables
which is beyond the capabilities of currently available commercial
software on the current hardware.