Automated Planning of Maintenance Inspections in Mining: An Integer Linear Programming Approach

Critical mineral processing equipment, such as conveyor belts and chutes, require periodic inspections to ensure operational continuity. Planning these inspections involves simultaneous constraints such as inspector availability, time windows, and scheduled production shutdowns. Large mining companies depend on specialized professionals who carry out this planning weekly manually, an extensive process that is susceptible to errors. The present work solves this problem through an integer linear programming model that maximizes the allocation of prioritized tasks, respecting the various operational constraints, using the CBC solver via OR-Tools. The model was implemented as an interactive web application in Streamlit, allowing data upload and export of optimized schedules in Excel. The results show that the planning, previously carried out manually in about 4 hours per week, is now executed in less than 5 minutes, evidencing the practical impact of Operational Research applied to industrial preventive maintenance.