Introducing an Approach to Control Caving Direction in Block Caving Mining

Mass production and the high rate of block caving have caused to special considerations in operational optimization of these mines. In caving mines, the uniform extraction not means as equal extraction from blocks. In the uniform caving, controlling of caving propagation is one of the most critical factors in the stability of caving mines. Selection of advancement direction is one of the most important constraints in block caving and in the advancement direction controlling one of the critical aspects related to blocks precedency. So the goal of this research is to determine block precedence according to caving direction. It is crucial to control and validate the advancement direction to reach an optimum scheduling program. In this paper, an innovative approach is presented to control and predict the best advancement direction. MATLAB software is the framework of the presented model. The designer can find the desired direction by introducing a start and end points for caving propagation. Finally, its output can be used as input to scheduling programs of caving mines. Application and comparison of the model based on the advancement direction algorithms are validated using 98 using over 12 periods. The results show that the presented model respected to advancement direction and the model size is an accepted range for production planning problems.