New technology contributions to the sustainable development of mineral resources: Developing a holistic stochastic simulation - optimization paradigm

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The sustainable development of Earth's mineral resources is critical for society; it promotes the responsible extraction of raw materials and metals and supports the developmental needs of emerging economies while simultaneously addressing environmental concerns. It is widely acknowledged that major uncertainties affect the development and utilization of mineral resources, particularly from supply (geology), technical (mining, processing and environment), and market (commodity prices, exchange rates) uncertainty. *** Within this context, our ongoing research has established a new stochastic modelling and optimization paradigm for mine planning, design, and production scheduling (SMPDS) that has focused on single mines and their production-related aspects. Outcomes include: (a) a new advanced modelling framework for quantifying supply uncertainty, termed high-order spatial simulation as well as multi-point and multi-scale wavelet based geostatistical simulation methods; (b) new complex stochastic mine optimization formulations that include several other aspects, such as market uncertainties; (c) exploration of several algorithmic approaches to address the major computational issues in (a) and (b); and lastly, (d) shifting from the established mining block economic-value-driven mine optimization approaches to new stochastic optimization methods that consider only the geological/rock characteristics of these blocks, such as grades, material types and deleterious materials. Our publications from this research outline advances and contributions to science and engineering, as well as the sustainable utilization of mineral reserves, social responsibility through better financial performance, and technically defendable objective decision-making.**** The proposed 5-year research program aims to build upon our previous findings, as well as investigate new research areas that require further developments in understanding, knowledge, and technology. The new research program follows our stochastic SMPDS paradigm in the broader context of “mine production to product development and market delivery”, and aims to explicitly include major environmental elements. The different aspects of a stochastic simulation-optimization include the development of an all-inclusive stochastic supply-meets-demand SMPDS optimization framework and the further development of the high-order geostatistical simulation framework, as needed to quantify the uncertainty of mineral resources considered in SMPDS.*********