Towards dynamical profit optimisation of comminution circuits.

There is an increasing demand to optimise performance and profit of comminution circuits. Research in this area has resulted in the development of numerous optimisation tools, and recent research has shown that the quality aspects of the production have a great influence on the optimisation results. The quality, cost, profit and capacity of a product are influenced by several parameters, and in order to control all of these parameters it is necessary to use some sort of optimisation algorithm. In this paper, a novel approach to apply e.g. cost, revenue, capacity and quality in order to perform a multi-objective optimisation with the ability to handle dynamic variations of a comminution is presented. The problem with optimisations in general is that the objective function used for optimisation is reduced in complexity in order to save computational time. In a comminution process performance varies with time and in order to perform a correct optimisation the objective function used must be able to handle this type of dynamic behaviour. The process has a given set of constraints that represents the conditions normal in these type of comminution applications. The first step in this paper is to identify if the range of the constraints can cause undesirable production costs when reaching for a given product property. In this step a dynamic response model is described that will be able to address the difficulties with optimising dynamic systems. The next step in the optimisation is the definition of the multi-objective optimisation formulation including constraints for the optimisation. Evaluating the result of the optimisation in combination with a strategy for relaxing constraint can show how to increase overall productivity and still reach certain product properties. The conclusions made in this work are that multi objective optimisation is essential when optimising a comminution circuit against multiple objectives. (Authors).
There is an increasing demand to optimise performance and profit of comminution circuits. Research in this area has resulted in the development of numerous optimisation tools, and recent research has shown that the quality aspects of the production have a great influence on the optimisation results. The quality, cost, profit and capacity of a product are influenced by several parameters, and in order to control all of these parameters it is necessary to use some sort of optimisation algorithm. In this paper, a novel approach to apply e.g. cost, revenue, capacity and quality in order to perform a multi-objective optimisation with the ability to handle dynamic variations of a comminution is presented. The problem with optimisations in general is that the objective function used for optimisation is reduced in complexity in order to save computational time. In a comminution process performance varies with time and in order to perform a correct optimisation the objective function used must be able to handle this type of dynamic behaviour. The process has a given set of constraints that represents the conditions normal in these type of comminution applications. The first step in this paper is to identify if the range of the constraints can cause undesirable production costs when reaching for a given product property. In this step a dynamic response model is described that will be able to address the difficulties with optimising dynamic systems. The next step in the optimisation is the definition of the multi-objective optimisation formulation including constraints for the optimisation. Evaluating the result of the optimisation in combination with a strategy for relaxing constraint can show how to increase overall productivity and still reach certain product properties. The conclusions made in this work are that multi objective optimisation is essential when optimising a comminution circuit against multiple objectives. (Authors).