Optimised decision-making under grade uncertainty in surface mining

Mining schedule optimisation often ignores geological and economic risks in favour of simplistic deterministic methods. In this thesis a scenario optimisation approach is developed which uses MILP optimisation results from multiple conditional simulations of geological data to derive a unique soluti...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Grobler, Francois
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: Curtin University 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/1376
Description
Summary:Mining schedule optimisation often ignores geological and economic risks in favour of simplistic deterministic methods. In this thesis a scenario optimisation approach is developed which uses MILP optimisation results from multiple conditional simulations of geological data to derive a unique solution. The research also generated an interpretive framework which incorporates the use of the Coefficient of Variation allowing the assessment of various optimisation results in order to find the solution with the most attractive risk-return ratio.