Development of an evaluation system for blasting patterns to provide efficient production

Blasting is one of the most important operations in mining projects involving production. Inappropriate blasting pattern may lead to unwanted events such as poor fragmentation, back break, fly rock, etc., as well as strong effects on the production rate. In fact, the selection of the most suitable pattern among the previously performed patterns can be considered as a Multi Attribute Decision Making problem. In this paper, first, from various performed patterns, the efficient and inefficient ones were determined using Data Envelopment Analysis. In the second step, linear assignment was used to evaluate the efficient patterns and recognize the most suitable pattern for providing high production rate. According to the obtained results, blasting pattern with the burden of 3.5 m, the spacing of 4.5 m, the stemming of 3.8 m and the hole length of 12.1 m was selected as the most appropriate blasting pattern and suggested for the future blasting operations.