Sustainable development and utilization of mineral resources: A stochastic mine planning optimization framework with uncertain metal supply and market demand

矿产资源和储量的可持续开发利用，确保了我们所依赖的原材料、金属和能源的持续供应。 可持续发展是一个关键的全球问题，特别是考虑到新兴经济体的快速增长和需求以及日益严重的环境问题。 影响可持续矿产资源开发的几个不确定性来源：技术、金融和环境。技术和经济上的不确定性包括矿体供应原材料的能力、采矿作业的不确定性、原材料和相关商品价格的市场需求波动。 迄今为止，我们正在进行的研究已经通过建立在不确定性模型（随机模型）和优化基础上的新技术进步，改变了矿山设计和生产调度（MDPS）的范式。这些措施量化了不确定性并管理风险，最大限度地提高生产率和矿山寿命，并提高投资回报率。在过去的5年中，新的随机采矿规划优化框架包括了几种基于风险的MDPS新方法，以及对矿床相关属性的空间方面进行建模。现场测试表明，与最佳常规做法相比，这些方法可以将相同资产的金属产量提高约15%，延长矿山寿命，并增加约25%的经济价值（差异基于相同的数据和生产特征）。这些改进完全是由于正在开发的新技术，并通过更好的财务业绩以及技术上可衡量和客观的决策，促进了矿产资源和储量的可持续利用。 基于我们迄今为止的研究和学习，提出了一个新的五年研究计划，通过新的计算效率高的随机优化方法，新的高阶随机模型和基于风险的金融模型，探索和进一步发展上述新的随机MDPS范式。这将包括扩大研究领域，解决我们过去研究中遇到的新问题，对新方法进行全领域测试，以及增加我们对新的随机框架和相关技术的理解。

The sustainable development and utilization of mineral resources and reserves ensures the continued supply of raw materials, metals and energy we rely upon. Sustainable development is a critical global problem, particularly given the fast growth and demand of emerging economies and increasing environmental concerns. Several sources of uncertainty impact sustainable mineral resource development: technical, financial, and environmental. Technical and economic uncertainties include the ability of orebodies to supply raw materials, operational mining uncertainties, fluctuating market demand for raw materials and related commodity prices. To date our ongoing research has shifted the paradigm for mine design and production scheduling (MDPS) through new technological advances founded on models of uncertainty (stochastic models) and optimization. These quantify uncertainty and manage risk, maximize productivity and mine life, and increase return on investment. During the past 5 years the new stochastic mine planning optimization framework has included several novel methods for risk-based MDPS, as well as modelling the spatial aspects of pertinent attributes of mineral deposits. Field testing shows that these methods can increase metal production for the same assets by about 15%, increase life of mine, and add about 25% of economic value compared to best conventional practices (differences are based on identical data and production characteristics). These improvements are only due to the new technologies being developed and contribute to the sustainable utilization of mineral resources and reserves through better financial performance, and technically defendable and objective decision-making. Based upon our research and learning to date, a new five year research program is proposed to explore and further develop the above new stochastic MDPS paradigm, through: new computationally efficient stochastic optimization methods, new high-order stochastic models, and risk-based financial models. This will include expanding the field of research, addressing new problems encountered in our past research, full-field testing of new methods, and increasing our understanding of the new stochastic framework and related technologies.