reza lotfian

Cement-based materials are fundamental resources used to in construction. The increase in requests for and consumption of cement products, especially in Iran, indicates that more cement plants should be equipped. This study developed a geographical information system using pairwise comparison based on grey numbers to identify potential sites in which to set up cement plants. A group of five experts compared the effective criteria using the data for South Khorasan province. After filtering numerous sites, an area with potential locations for construction of a cement plant has been identified. The selection of a potential area considered the distance to mines, access roads, gas source, and faults. Classification maps were surveyed for land use, pedology, and topography. A potential area was resulted in the north of the province based on the importance weights of 0.307, 0.301, 0.17, 0.087, 0.082, 0.04, and 0.032 for the criteria of land use, proximity to mines, proximity to access roads, proximity to gas substations, topography, pedology, and proximity to faults, respectively.

One of the most crucial decisions in mine design is to locate mine infrastructures. The problem of locating a processing plant can be considered in the form of a multi-objective case, which can be solved by goal programming method. In this paper, a fuzzy-based goal programming approach was developed in order to solve the problem of processing plant site determination. In order to determine the efficiency of the developed approach, Sungun copper area was studied. In this case, five goals were considered as adjacency to crusher, adjacency to tailing dam, adjacency to power source, distance from blasting sources, and topography of the available land. Furthermore, six feasible alternatives were initially specified by studying Sungun area map, and then were prioritized using the approach. After investigating the considered area, it was specified that the determined site is the most ideal alternative in this case, considering the levels of the goals and their fuzzy weights.

The accurate selection of a processing plant site can result in decreasing total mining cost. This problem can be solved by multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. This research introduces a new approach by integrating fuzzy AHP and gray MCDM methods to solve all decision-making problems. The approach is applied in the case of a copper mine area. The critical criteria are considered adjacency to the crusher, adjacency to tailing dam, adjacency to a power source, distance from blasting sources, the availability of sufficient land, and safety against floods. After studying the mine map, six feasible alternatives are prioritized using the integrated approach. Results indicated that sites A, B, and E take the first three ranks. The separate results of fuzzy AHP and gray MCDM confirm that alternatives A and B have the first two ranks. Moreover, the field investigations approved the results obtained by the approach.