Risk Assessment Methods in Mining Industry-A Systematic Review

Featured Application This article is focused on a literature review in order to provide a valuable resource for understanding the latest developments in risk management and assessment in the mining sector. The conducted research will be useful for many people, including risk managers, mining engineers, and researchers, who are interested in risk management/engineering issues. The authors believe that the conducted literature review will introduce the readers to the major up-to-date theory and practice in risk management/assessment problems in the mining sector. The presented study gives the possibility to identify the thematic structure related to risk assessment/management for the analyzed industry sector. In addition, it shows which topics from the studied scientific area are the most investigated in a given country/region. At the same time, the conducted analysis gave an opportunity to develop future research directions in the areas identified as research and knowledge gaps. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the mining industry in issues related to risk assessment and management, which is confirmed by a significant number of publications and reports devoted to these problems. However, theoretical and application studies have indicated that risk in mining should be analyzed not only in the human factor aspect, but also in strategic (environmental impact) and operational ones. However, there is a lack of research on systematic literature reviews and surveys of studies that would focus on these identified risk aspects simultaneously. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to develop a literature review in the area of analysis, assessment and risk management in the mining sector, published in the last decade and based on the concept of a human engineering system. Following this, a systematic search was performed with the use of Primo multi-search tool following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The main inclusion criteria were: (a) not older than 10 years, (b) article written in English, (c) publication type (scientific article, book, book chapter), (d) published in chosen electronic collections (Springer, Taylor and Francis, Elsevier, Science Direct, JSTOR). This resulted in the selection of the 94 most relevant papers in the area. First, the general bibliometric analysis was conducted. Later, the selected papers in this review were categorized into four groups and the critical review was developed. One of the main advantages of this study is that the results are obtained from different scientific sources/databases thanks to using a multi-search tool. Moreover, the authors identified the main research gaps in the area of the implementation of risk management in the mining industry.