EVALUATION OF BLASTING PATTERNS USING OPERATIONAL RESEARCH MODELS

Blasting is one of the most important operations, which has a great technical and economical effect on the mining projects. Criteria such as fragmentation (operation ultimate objective) and ground vibration, flyrock, airblast, etc. (operation side effects) should be considered in the assessment of blasting operation. A suitable pattern should be able to provide both reasonable (required) fragmentation and blasting side effects. In order to evaluate blasting performance, operational research models such as multi attribute decision making technique (MADM) can be applied. Technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS), a branch of MADM, is a strong method for pattern ranking. The other quantitative method which is applied in the evaluation of systems' efficiency is data envelopment analysis (DEA) model. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a new hybrid MADM model for selecting the most appropriate blasting pattern in Chadormalu iron mine, Iran. In this regard, DEA method was utilized to select the efficient blast patterns thereafter TOPSIS was used to recognize the most suitable pattern amongst the selected patterns by DEA method. It was concluded that the patterns J, G and B are the most appropriate patterns for blasting operations in the Chadormalu iron mine.