Direct block scheduling under marketing uncertainties

Abstract Mineral projects are composed of geological, operational and market uncertainties, and reducing these uncertainties is one of the objectives of engineering. Most surveys assess the impact of geological and operational uncertainties on the mining planning. The objective of this work is to study the impact of market uncertainty on the mineral activity. The influence of iron ore price simulation on mining sequencing will be evaluated. The price of iron ore has random behavior that is best represented by the Geometric Brownian Movement system. This study analyzed the historical series of iron ore in order to determine the percentage volatility and drift. Traditionally, a constant and deterministic price is used for the ore mined in all periods of a mineral project. The direct block scheduling methodology was adopted because it is able to apply the appropriate financial discount factor to the simulated probabilistic price. The proposed methodology was able to quantify the market uncertainty.摘要：矿业项目兼具地质、运营与市场层面的不确定性，管控此类不确定性亦是工程研究的核心目标之一。现有多数调研均聚焦于地质与运营不确定性对采矿规划的影响。本研究旨在探究市场不确定性对矿业活动的影响，将评估铁矿石价格模拟对采矿序列规划的影响。铁矿石价格具有随机波动特性，最适宜以几何布朗运动（Geometric Brownian Movement）模型表征。本研究通过剖析铁矿石历史价格序列，确定其波动率与漂移率的百分比参数。传统矿业项目规划中，通常为全周期开采的矿石设定固定且确定的价格。本研究采用直接块段调度法（direct block scheduling），因其可将适配的财务折现系数应用于模拟得到的概率化价格。所提出的方法可实现市场不确定性的量化分析。