Adaptive self-learning mechanisms for updating short-term production decisions in an industrial mining complex

A mining complex is an integrated value chain where the materials extracted from a group of mineral deposits are sent to different processing streams to produce sellable products. A major short-term decision in a mining complex is to determine the flow of materials that first includes deciding which handling facilities to send the extracted materials and then determining how to utilize the processing facilities. The flow of materials through the mining complex is significantly dependent on the performance of and interaction between its different components. New digital technologies, including the development of advanced sensors and monitoring devices, have enabled a mining complex to acquire new information about the performance of its different components. This paper proposes a new continuous updating framework that combines policy gradient reinforcement learning and an extended ensemble Kalman filter to adapt the short-term flow of materials in a mining complex with incoming information. The framework first uses a new extended ensemble Kalman filter to update the uncertainty models of the different components of a mining complex with new incoming information. Then, the updated uncertainty models are fed to a neural network trained using a policy gradient reinforcement learning algorithm to adapt the short-term flow of materials in a mining complex. The proposed framework is applied to a copper mining complex and shows its ability to efficiently adapt the short-term flow of materials in an operational mining environment with new incoming information. The framework better meets the different production targets while improving the cumulative cash flow compared to industry standard approaches.