That is all reclaimer activities, e.g., the reclaimer movements along its rail track and the reclaiming of a stockpile, have to be modeled in continuous time.

When deciding a stockpile location, a stockpile stacking start time, and a stockpile reclaiming start time, a number of constraints have to be taken into account: at any point in time no two stockpiles can occupy the same space on a pad, reclaimers cannot be assigned to two stockpiles at the same time, reclaimers can only be assigned to stockpiles on pads that they serve, reclaimers serving the same pad cannot pass each other, the stockpiles of a vessel have to be reclaimed in a specified reclaim order and the time between the reclaiming of consecutive stockpiles of a vessel can be no more than a prespecified limit, the so-called continuous reclaim time limit, and the reclaiming of the first stockpile of a vessel cannot start before *all* stockpiles of that vessel have been stacked. We focus on some of the aspects of real world reclaimer scheduling as specified in Section 4.

The reclaiming of a stockpile using a bucket wheel reclaimer is conducted in a series of long travel bench cuts. For each 