| dc.description.abstract | The topic addressed in this dissertation is a set of economically important operational
problems in the gold mining industry that are solved using mathematical models of operations
research. More specifically, the main objective of this thesis is to formulate and evaluate decision
support models for three important diverse challenges which were found to exist at an underground
gold mine in Northwestern Ontario: Newmont Goldcorp’s Red Lake Gold Mine. The challenges
discovered at Red Lake Gold Mine are not peculiar to that location but are economically relevant
to the underground gold mining industry in as whole. The mine at Red Lake provided a deeper
understanding of the problems and data sets.
The challenges modeled and solved in this dissertation are: i. minimizing freshwater used in the
processing of gold ore; ii. optimizing ore-waste material flow in an underground gold mine; and
iii. optimal dispatching of trucks and shovels in an underground gold mine. Each of the three
problems was treated with a formulation of the model which is innovative and the evaluation of
the results of each case study showed that improved decisions can result when these models are
used.
This dissertation shows that, for a single gold mine, problems of major economic importance can
be found, innovatively modeled, and solved using the methods of operations research. In addition,
since these problems are not peculiar to one gold mine, but are found in other gold mines, the
innovation of this dissertation is relevant to the underground gold mining industry as a whole and
therefore constitutes a minor but important advance in the practical knowledge in this industry | en_US |
