The supply of iron ore closest to the target grade with lowest operation cost is the main concern for the ore producer in mining industries. An automatic optimal reclaiming system to reclaim iron ore from stockpiles using the bucket wheel reclaimer (BWR) is proposed. However, this paper only presents a study on identifying optimal stockpile voxels for the target quantity and quality grade. Stockpiles here are represented by combinations of voxels, each possessing certain quality composition. The main focus of this paper is to identify the combination of voxels from available stockpile voxels that will fulfil quality and quantity demand of iron ore while maintaining BWR minimum movement on reclaiming. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.