Considering the Epistemic Uncertainties of the Variogram Model in Locating Additional Exploratory Drillholes

Abstract

To enhance the certainty of the grade block model, it is necessary to increase the number of exploratory drillholes and collect more data from the deposit. The inputs of the process of locating these additional drillholes include the variogram model parameters, locations of the samples taken from the initial drillholes, and the geological block model. The uncertainties of these inputs will lead to uncertainties in the optimal locations of additional drillholes. Meanwhile, the locations of the initial data are crisp, but the variogram model parameters and the geological model have uncertainties due to the limitation of the number of initial data. In this paper, effort has been made to consider the effects of variogram uncertainties on the optimal location of additional drillholes using the fuzzy kriging and solve the locating problem with the genetic algorithm (GA) optimization method.A bauxite deposit case study has shown the efficiency of the proposed model.