Rivers are dynamic geological agents on the earth which transport the weathered materials of the continent to the sea. Estimation of suspended sediment yield (SSY) is essential for management, planning, and designing in any river basin system. Estimation of SSY is critical due to its complex nonlinear processes, which are not captured by conventional regression methods. Rainfall, temperature, water discharge, SSY, rock type, relief, and catchment area data of 11 gauging stations were utilized to develop robust artificial intelligence (AI), similar to an artificial-neural-network (ANN)-based model for SSY prediction. The developed highly generalized global single ANN model using a large amount of data was applied at individual gauging stations for SSY prediction in the Mahanadi River basin, which is one of India’s largest peninsular rivers. It appeared that the proposed ANN model had the lowest root-mean-squared error (0.0089) and mean absolute error (0.0029) along with the highest coefficient of correlation (0.867) values among all comparative models (sediment rating curve and multiple linear regression). The ANN provided the best accuracy at Tikarapara among all stations. The ANN model was the most suitable substitute over other comparative models for SSY prediction. It was also noticed that the developed ANN model using the combined data of eleven stations performed better at Tikarapara than the other ANN which was developed using data from Tikarapara only. These approaches are suggested for SSY prediction in river basin systems due to their ease of implementation and better performance.

Suspended sediment yield (SSY) prediction plays a crucial role in the planning of water resource management and design. Accurate sediment prediction using conventional models is very difficult due to many complex processes. We developed a fully automatic highly generalized accurate and robust artificial intelligence models for SSY prediction in Godavari River Basin, India. The genetic algorithm (GA), hybridized with an artificial neural network (ANN) (GA-ANN), is a suitable artificial intelligence model for SSY prediction. The GA is used to concurrently optimize all ANN’s parameters. The GA-ANN was developed using daily water discharge, with water level as the input data to estimate the daily SSY at Polavaram, which is the farthest gauging station in the downstream of the Godavari River Basin. The performances of the GA-ANN model were evaluated by comparing with ANN, sediment rating curve (SRC) and multiple linear regression (MLR) models. It is observed that the GA-ANN contains the highest correlation coefficient (0.927) and lowest root mean square error (0.053) along with lowest biased (0.020) values among all the comparative models. The GA-ANN model is the most suitable substitute over traditional models for SSY prediction. The hybrid GA-ANN can be recommended for estimating the SSY due to comparatively superior performance and simplicity of applications.

This study involves a working limestone mine that supplies limestone to the cement factory. The two main goals of this paper are to (a) determine how long an operating mine can continue to provide the cement plant with the quality and quantity of materials it needs, and (b) explore the viability of combining some limestone from a nearby mine with the study mine limestone to meet the cement plant’s quality and quantity goals. These objectives are accomplished by figuring out the maximum net profit for the ultimate pit limit and production sequencing of the mining blocks. The issues were resolved using a branch-and-cut based sequential integer and mixed integer programming problem. The study mine can exclusively feed the cement plant for up to 15 years, according to the data. However, it was also noted that the addition of the limestone from the neighboring mine substantially increased the mine’s life (85 years). The findings also showed that, when compared with the production planning formulation that the company is now using, the proposed approach creates 10% more profit. The suggested method also aids in determining the desired desirable quality of the limestone that will be transported from the nearby mine throughout each production stage.

Rivers play a major role within ecosystems and society, including for domestic, industrial, and agricultural uses, and in power generation. Forecasting of suspended sediment yield (SSY) is critical for design, management, planning, and disaster prevention in river basin systems. It is difficult to forecast the SSY using conventional methods because these approaches cannot handle complicated non-stationarity and non-linearity. Artificial intelligence techniques have gained popularity in water resources due to handling complex problems of SSY. In this study, a fully automated generalized single hybrid intelligent artificial neural network (ANN)-based genetic algorithm (GA) forecasting model was developed using water discharge, temperature, rainfall, SSY, rock type, relief, and catchment area data of eleven gauging stations for forecasting the SSY. It is applied at individual gauging stations for SSY forecasting in the Mahanadi River which is one of India’s largest peninsular rivers. All parameters of the ANN are optimized automatically and simultaneously using the GA. The multi-objective algorithm was applied to optimize the two conflicting objective functions (error variance and bias). The mean square error objective function was considered for the single-objective optimization model. Single and multi-objective GA-based ANN, autoregressive and multivariate autoregressive models were compared to each other. It was found that the single-objective GA-based ANN model provided the best accuracy among all comparative models, and it is the most suitable substitute for forecasting SSY. If the measurement of SSY is unavailable, then single-objective GA-based ANN modeling approaches can be recommended for forecasting SSY due to comparatively superior performance and simplicity of implementation.

Open pit mine production scheduling is a computationally expensive large-scale mixed-integer linear programming problem. This research develops a computationally efficient algorithm to solve open pit production scheduling problems under uncertain geological parameters. The proposed solution approach for production scheduling is a two-stage process. The stochastic production scheduling problem is iteratively solved in the first stage after relaxing resource constraints using a parametric graph closure algorithm. Finally, the branch-and-cut algorithm is applied to respect the resource constraints, which might be violated during the first stage of the algorithm. Six small-scale production scheduling problems from iron and copper mines were used to validate the proposed stochastic production scheduling model. The results demonstrated that the proposed method could significantly improve the computational time with a reasonable optimality gap (the maximum gap is 4%). In addition, the proposed stochastic method is tested using industrial-scale copper data and compared with its deterministic model. The results show that the net present value for the stochastic model improved by 6% compared to the deterministic model.