Adaptive mine planning under geological uncertainty: A POMDP framework for sequential decision-making

TL;DR

This paper introduces a POMDP-based framework for adaptive mine planning that sequentially updates beliefs and decisions, significantly improving economic outcomes under geological uncertainty.

Contribution

It develops a hybrid SA-POMDP architecture combining simulated annealing and ensemble data assimilation for tractable, adaptive mine scheduling.

Findings

Reduces expectation-reality gap from 22.3% to 4.6%.

Improves NPV by USD8.4M over static plans.

Outperforms static planning by up to USD44.6M under misspecification.

Abstract

Strategic mine production scheduling under geological uncertainty is conventionally formulated as a stochastic optimization problem in which a fixed extraction sequence and routing decisions are computed ex ante. This plan-driven paradigm treats uncertainty as passive: decisions are hedged across geological scenarios, but planning does not anticipate how future observations will inform future decisions. We propose a different perspective by formulating mine scheduling as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), in which extraction and routing decisions are made sequentially with planning explicitly integrating the expectation of future belief updates. To achieve computational tractability, we introduce a hybrid SA-POMDP architecture that combines simulated annealing-based (SA) value approximation with ensemble-based belief updating via ensemble smoother with multiple data assimilation (ES-MDA). At each decision epoch, candidate actions are evaluated through their expected long-term value under the current belief, and the belief is updated as mining observations are assimilated. This yields an adaptive policy rather than a fixed plan. We evaluate the framework on a copper-gold open-pit mining complex with multiple processing destinations. Under a statistically consistent prior, the SA-POMDP reduces the expectation-reality gap from 22.3% to 4.6%, improving realized NPV by USD8.4M relative to one-shot stochastic optimization. Under systematic prior misspecification of 10%, the adaptive framework outperforms static planning by up to USD44.6M (36.9%), demonstrating structural robustness beyond scenario hedging. These results show that sequential belief updating transforms geological uncertainty from a passive constraint into an active component of value creation.