Fondef funding for Incorporation of geological uncertainty for risk analysis in mine planning.

Fabián Soto, member of ALGES, part of Department of Mining Engineering and The Advanced Technology Center was awarded with Fondef funding of the IDeA I+D contest called “Incorporation of geological uncertainty for risk analysis in mine planning”, whose main goal is to incorporate the risk analysis in mine planning through the consideration of the geological uncertainty.

One goal is to develop an application that allows to build geostatistical simulations and related analysis tools.

The project aims to incorporate technological innovation into open pit operations. Resource assessment and mine planning conventional methods are very sensitive. This causes minor variations in the process that can produce high impact in future result scenarios. It’s important to keep in mind that decision making should involve risk analysis according to possible scenarios. After that, decision makers should choose an optimal solution according to some criteria, at this point and because of these reasons, it’s very important to quantify the uncertainty of these scenarios. This project will focus on geological uncertainty.

Geostatistical simulation tools will be developed using methods on the top of current knowledge, these tools will be integrated into the ANDES software, to allow resource models building with the addition of its geological uncertainty quantification. These models will be used in the mine planning stage in order to analyze the impact of the geological uncertainty in different processes such as reserve calculation and final pit stages for example.

These project shows the collaboration of two laboratories belonging to the AMTC and the department of mining engineering: ALGES and DELPHOS, this will allow to generate synergies taking advantage of applied research capabilities of the laboratories, mining know how of BHP and technological development of OPCIONES, the two companies involved in this project