Abstract
The third international symposium on Orebody Modelling and Strategic Mine Planning was held in Perth, Australia 24–26 November 2014. It followed the previous highly successful symposia in 2004 and 2009.
In addition to the Chair, Professor Roussos Dimitrakopoulos (McGill University), the Organising Committee comprised John Battista (BHP Billiton), Vaughan Chamberlain (AngloGold Ashanti) and Marcelo Godoy (Newmont Mining Corporation). The symposium was organised by the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.
The 47 papers presented at the symposium represent the state-of-the-art in technologies that quantify uncertainty and manage decision-making risk in the world's mining industry. Uncertainty arises from geology and mineral occurrence, prices, costs, mineral supply and market demand. With the increasing need to take an integrated systems approach to mine optimisation, uncertainty now also includes a range of relatively new variables that quantify the response of in situ material to processes such as blasting, crushing, grinding and types of physical and chemical processing. Whilst these variables provide the means of more realistic and flexible planning, optimisation and operation, they also open up new areas of research.
Given the importance of strategic mine planning, it was decided to produce a thematic issue of Mining Technology comprising revised and extended versions of a representative selection of papers presented at the symposium.
The papers for this issue were selected on the basis of quality, significance of content and the range of coverage of practice and developments. The selection was made by Professor Dimtrakopoulos who is also the Guest Editor of the issue. All invited papers were subject to the Mining Technology peer review process and we thank the reviewers for their contributions to this thematic issue. The title of the issue is a reflection of the general focus of the symposium and, in particular, of the content of the papers that appear in the following pages.
I am sure this thematic issue of Mining Technology will provide a valuable and lasting reference for industry, researchers and developers. For those who attended the conference, this issue provides more detailed versions of the selected presentations. For those who did not attend the conference, this issue will provide a sample of the range and quality of papers presented in Perth. The entire set of papers presented at the symposium is available in the symposium proceedings available from the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (Dimitrakopoulos 2014).