The power plant owner is interested to know in advance the quality of coal to be burnt which should meet maximal efficiency of power plant and the environmental regulations. There is the need to control and to predict the quality of coal at the mine site to meet sulfur emission requirements. Coal quality control between the mine site and the utility plant is a complex problem owing to the variable nature of coal properties (heating value, sulfur, ash), even within the same coal seam. Due to the fluctuation of the coal quality, mine planning and coal homogenization are in fact an optimization problem under uncertain conditions. To deal with these issues a stochastic optimization model is developed for an illustrative coal homogenization problem. Mining block grades from an optimized mining schedule are used to simulate any given homogenization process in stockpiles throughout the mine's life. Sulfur content is treated as lognormally distributed random variable. The objectives of the model include minimizing the expected sulfur content and standard deviation in sulfur content. The methodology was illustrated using the case study on Kolubara surface coal mine.

The main goal of coal quality control in lignite mines is to supply coal to power plants within certain quality constraints. Coal properties can affect the efficiency, reliability, and availability of both the boiler and the emission control units. This paper presents a new based integrated mine process simulation approach to investigate the variability of the calorific value in exploitation a complex lignite deposits. Results provide valuable insight into the performance of a continuous mining system in terms of controlling coal quality variability.

In contemporary mining industry is very difficult to achieve production targets and profit without investing effort in detailed excavation planning. It is especially true for deposits with complex geological structure and production technology, as is the case for many coal mines in Serbia. The majority of coal production is used for generation of electricity in power plant. This fact is the main reason why production objectives of coal mine and power plant are strongly connected. Due to the fluctuation of the coal quality, operational mine planning (as a part of coal homogenization process), is of critical importance for managing successful coal quality control and meeting criteria of power plant. This paper investigates advantage of proper operational planning on coal quality control process and overall production performance. For better understanding case study is conducted on open pit Tamnava West field. Successful operational mine planning is almost impossible without use of modern software packages. For that reason in presented case study operational mine planning is done with Minex software.