Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Canada's hard rock mining industry faces challenges in an internationally competitive market. Mines are becoming more difficult to justify and there is a growing need to improve the planning of underground operations to maximise the financial return from existing mines and optimise the extraction of new orebodies. * The applicant is applying for a 5-year grant to facilitate an increased research effort in the area of optimising mining schedules and mine planning. An increase in the research effort for optimising rock excavation process is needed to maximise the financial returns or minimise costs from current mining and civil projects. * Mining companies can now currently use mine specific scheduling packages to help with the planning process and quickly see the impact of a schedule on a computer screen. The process is too complex to optimise with the data at hand and hence the produced plan is normally a compromise between a couple of main objectives and the time constraints at that particular operation. A number of research tasks have been proposed to: combine drift development (tunneling) access optimisation with the existing stope sequence optimisation capability; develop alternative financial risk evaluation techniques for mining and civil projects which incorporate technical and market risk factors into the method; incorporate uncertainty within the optimisation process for available spatial data; and finalise a strategic ventilation planning method for mining and civil projects based on excavation activities and basic rock and climatic parameters. * The results of this research will contribute to the development of modified mine planning techniques to optimise the rock excavation sequences and maximise financial returns, whilst still adhering to the operational constraints. The novelty of this research lies in producing optimised mine schedules which can not currently be performed within the industry. * Training of highly qualified personnel is part of this research through the use of graduate students and research associates, for whom funding is requested.