Optimal Search for and Mining of Underwater Mineral Resources
Marc Mangel · SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics · 1983
We consider the problem of search for and then mining of a resource on the floor of the ocean. One such resource is the manganese nodule. We show that the search and mining problems can both be formulated as constrained optimization problems. These problems can be solved by simple variational techniques if the characteristic length of the search or mining process is small compared to the other lengths in the problem so that some perturbation techniques can be employed. We show how to find the optimal stopping time when mining one region and how to optimally allocate mining effort over a number of different regions.