Mining, Metals, Energy and Commodity Industries Optimization

Optimization opportunities in mining, metals, energy and commodity industries.

Mining Optimization Solutions for Smarter Mine-to-Market Activities

Today’s challenging and volatile commodity world is driving extraction and processing firms to leverage analytics and AI-based technologies throughout various stages of mine-to-market activities.

DecisionBrain helps you achieve quick wins by leveraging modular, fully customizable software systems that support you in making the best possible plans, schedules and real-time logistics decisions while respecting real-world constraints.

AI Optimization Engines

Competing objectives have to be considered simultaneously, such as costs and delivery times. To do this, we use proven AI Optimization engines to quickly sifts through millions of possible solutions and arrive at one or more that provides a good balance between various, often competing objectives.

Users can then make adjustments and compare different scenarios in terms of key performance indicators, such as labor, fuel, or demurrage costs and on-time delivery rates.

Mining Optimization Opportunities

We help you incrementally progress toward achieving process excellence across mining/extraction, processing and transportation activities:

  • Allocating pellet-product orders to pellet mills and efficiently sequencing of these production orders on the mills, eg by minimizing changeovers between product runs on pellet mills
  • Generating feasible blends for each product, subject to mix restrictions and grouping rules
  • Allocating the right blends to production orders while considering due dates, mine production rates, inventory availability and storage capacity limits
  • Scheduling mining train loading and scheduling of railroad network to transport materials
  • Direction of conveyor belt movements, speeds and feed rates to streamline the flow of materials and products, e.g. within a port complex
  • Efficient loading of ships with consideration for min/max limits on tonnage and minimization of demurrage costs resulting from late loading of orders
  • Sequencing and assigning of ships to piers

Video: Reducing Emissions in Steel Manufacturing Using Optimization & Forecasting

This presentation is adapted from a presentation delivered at the 2022 Hannover Messe conference in Germany.

It comes out of some joint work between DecisionBrain and IBM in the steel industry. We will highlight one particular project focused on maximizing the productive usage of flammable by-product gases.