Introduction to Open Pit Optimization

Open pit optimization is an import step in the mine planning process  it is used to define the most profitable pit shell (or nested pit shells) for a given set of economic parameters the shell is then used as a guide de make a detailed pit design, but alot of mining engineers and companies tend to ignore this important step. In this course you will understand how important is the pit optimization and how can an optimizer generate the optimal pit shell that maximise the profit. you will see also what data are required to run an optimizer and how are they used, in the end of the course you will learn also how the algorithm of the optimizer ( lerchs grossman algorithm)  does it's magic to generate the pit shell, the course also covers some of the mining engineering concepts that are required to run an optimizer like geological databases geological modelling , block modelling and much more.  This course will have an update soon in which i'll include a practical example on how to do pit optimization in a mining software. Students needs to know some of the basics of mining engineering or geology in order to follow this course.