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With pumps as the main devices, the main drainage system (MDS) is critical to mine construction and production. Considering the high cost of traditional manual pump scheduling strategy and the wide adoption of time-of-use (TOU) electricity traffic in coal mines, this paper attempts to reduce the mine operation cost by scheduling the pumps in the flat and valley periods instead of the peak period. For this purpose, the pump scheduling was considered as an optimization problem, the water level of the sump was predicted by double exponential smoothing, and then the optimal pump scheduling plan was derived by ant colony optimization (ACO). The pump scheduling plan obtained by the proposed method was proved cost efficient through experiments on a gold mine in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A novel framework is proposed for urban growth boundaries delineation. • Optimization algorithm, carrying capacity analysis, and land-use suitability evaluation are integrated. • Carrying capacity analysis ensures sustainable development for each sub-region and quantifies as constrains. • Land-use suitability evaluates the potential of land-use functions and views as optimization objectives. • The proposed framework can facilitate urban growth boundaries delineation. Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) have viewed as an efficient tool to control disorderly urban expansion and promote urban sustainable development. The existing methods related to UGBs delineation have also focused mainly on improving the efficiency and applicability of the methods. However, it is not enough to emphasize simply the superiority of the methods, especially in China. UGBs delineation not only considers regional heterogeneous resource endowments but also further coordinates pre-existing land-use plans and the conflicts with one another. The study presents a novel framework for delineating UGBs from carrying-capacity-oriented perspective whose contributions are twofold. Firstly, the level of carrying capacity on resource and environment for each sub-region was evaluated by carrying capacity analysis. A modified mechanism was used to coordinate the inter-regional trade-off between urban growth and carrying capacity on resource and environment and quantify as the constraints of the algorithm. The suitability evaluations of multiple land-use type, including urban lands, agricultural lands, and ecological lands, are viewed as the optimization objectives of the algorithm together with urban landscape compactness. Second, we develop a comprehensive method coupling carrying capacity analysis, land-use suitability evaluation, and modified ant colony optimization algorithm. It can not only coordinate the conflicts with the land-use plans but also ensure the sustainable development for each sub-region. The dilation and erosion algorithm generates optimal UGBs. The proposed framework was applied to UGBs delineation in Wuhan, a rapidly urbanizing city in China. Multi-scenarios UGBs were delineated by the proposed framework. The results demonstrated carrying-capacity-oriented UGBs delineation perspective is more practical and closer to reality than the results of traditional methods. The conceptual and methodological advancement of this study is applicable to other cities to assist UGBs delineation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]