A NOVEL APPROACH FOR GEOSTATISTICAL MODELING AND PRODUCTION SCHEDULING OF IRON DEPOSITS WITH INEQUALITY CONSTRAINTS

Abstract

The modern mining industry employs plenty of exploration data digitization and utilizes computational resources for future forecasting and production scheduling. In that regard, geostatistics and mine planning as disciplines are critical parts of the mining business. However, traditional mine planning does not allow the risk management associated with geological uncertainty due to using a single mineral resource model as an input. Integration of stochastic geostatistical realizations into mine planning can help to minimize the risk of not meeting the production targets. Nevertheless, there are still many limitations in commercially used stochastic geostatistical algorithms, particularly multivariate methods. For example, it is common to deal with challenging datasets containing bivariate complexities among variables, such as inequality constraints.....