Abstract: The transportation problem of the open-pit mine is investigated in this paper.The unbalanced transportation problem is converted into a balanced one by introducing a virtual loading area.The balanced transportation problem is further reduced to a scheduling optimization problem according to its characteristics.A simulated annealing algorithm is implemented to solve the scheduling optimization problem.The new solution is generated by swapping the elements at two randomly chosen positions in the existed solution.The geometric cooling scheme is adopted in the temperature dropping process.A transportation problem with 9 loading areas and 5 unloading areas is used to test the optimization algorithm.The optimal solution obtained by the simulated annealing algorithm is the same as that found by the classical simplex algorithm.The computation result illustrates the effectiveness of the simulated annealing approach to the transportation problem.