Patent ID: 8103364

Claim:
A method of open pit mining with waste dumping, comprising: extracting material from the open pit and determining whether the material is sent to any one or more of stockpiling, waste and processing; defining a road network interconnecting a plurality of zones; determining with a processor waste movement along the network from its origin being the zone in which the waste was produced to a destination being the zone in which the waste is to be dumped each zone containing a plurality of blocks, material extracted from one of the blocks in a zone being sent to a predetermined entry point on the road network, moving the material across the network and depositing the waste material in at least one external waste dump as determined by the processor, and some of the waste material being determined by the processor to be moved on the road network to terminate at one of the zones within the pit, and the processor allocating the material moved to one of the zones within the pit proportionally to an in pit waste dump defined by a refill aggregate that overlaps with that zone, the refill aggregate being a space formed after extraction of material from that aggregate and therefore cleared of original material and after any refill aggregate which sits below that aggregate has been completely refilled; and jointly optimizing the extraction of material and movement of waste with the processor to optimize the net value of a joint extraction and waste movement schedule.