RESOURCE GEOLOGY, vol.58, no.2, pp.188-195, 2008 (SCI-Expanded)
Evaluating the geological properties of a mineral deposit is a fundamental task for mine planning and it requires an assessment of reserve parameters such as thickness and grade. This paper presents a linguistic model for estimating bauxite thickness within a deposit in a fuzzy environment using indicator geostatistics and fuzzy modeling. The proposed model consists of two main stages: determining the orebody boundary and estimating the thickness. In order to estimate the thickness, a rule-based fuzzy inference mechanism has been developed based on data statistics. Results and performance of the model have been compared with that of a well-known conventional technique, geostatistics (kriging), and it is shown that the proposed model has bigger estimation power. In addition, the fuzzy approach is more flexible than the kriging approach. The fuzzy methodology used in the present paper is convenient for modeling reserve parameters.