Integrating mineral mining and metallurgical supply chains: a qualogistics approach

The unbalance between supply and demand of raw materials and products worldwide culminates in colossal challenges in global supply chains. Engineering management that relies on lean design and operation is essential for the long-term viability of the value chain to keep enterprises' operations within an acceptable profit margin at the production level in both natural resource exploration and processing transformation sites. In this work, quantity and quality dimensions of mineral raw material feedstocks are considered from a logistics perspective for an integrated mining and metallurgical supply chain. Such a complete producer-processer integration of raw materials, amounts, and properties of the concentrated mineral diet to be fed in metallurgical furnaces, follows a sequence of mined-to-fed resource management with logistics and quality constraints to be met. This includes (1) exploration and processing in the mining sites, (2) shipping of concentrated mineral pellets, and (3) logistics and mixtures of materials before the furnace feeding in metallurgical sites. In this operational decision-making set, mixed-integer solutions for resource management include the following sequence. First, it involves the assignment of equipment to be shared in different quality exploration fields (e.g., trucks and conveyor-belts). Second, conveying the crushed-ore to be mixed-stocked using shuttle-conveyor-belts in simultaneous positioning to match the qualities of the stockpiles to be ground, floated, and processed into concentrated pellets. Finally, shipping of the blended mineral pellets and metallurgical site logistics and blending mixtures before the furnace feeding. In this work, an enterprise-wide optimization of a unified mining and metallurgical of raw materials is proposed for an improved stockpiling and blending in both supply chains. Thus, their integration can be achieved to maximise the ratio of ores (in the mining field) to metals (in the metallurgical site) output while minimising operational and capital costs.