Deep mining, driven by the increasing need of the sustainable use of mineral resources
yields a possibility to fully extract the untapped deposits. Nevertheless, large depths
remain challenging and complex environment. Rockbursts and induced seismicity,
considered as georisks, are one of the most relevant risks identified in the field, which
threat both safety and economics. Risk management tools and guidelines are essential to
maintain safe and economically feasible extraction, but they still need improvements. One
such opportunity identified here is the development of on-line georisk management
systems, and going even further, a creation of a risk management concept covering the
entire mine. This master’s thesis is a part of the On-line Risk Management in Deep Mines
(ORMID) project, funded by the Academy of Finland, running under the Mineral
Resources and Material Substitution programme.
Systematic review of the literature was conducted to enable addressing the thesis goals:
identification of the gaps in research concerning on-line georisk management in
underground hard rock mines, establishment of the state-of-the-art of the developments
in that topic, and providing recommendations for future research. Three databases were
used for the search: Scopus, ScienceDirect, and IEEEXplore. To search the databases 12
keywords and phrases were formulated. The search was conducted in three phases: out of
13 767 studies identified, 98 were taken into manual investigation, and 50 of them were
finally included in this master’s thesis.
The gap identified in this study is the lack of research that examines the methods of
rockmass stress calculation and forecasting based on the strain measurements. Only two
examples of them were obtained in the study. Another issue that comes out is a need of
deeper understanding of rockburst phenomenon. Moreover, a very low number of
systems capable of on-line georisk management was identified. Dynamic Intelligent
Ground Monitoring (Digmine), Mine Seismicity Risk Analysis Program (MS-RAP) and
one standard architecture (AziSA) of the on-line georisk management were recognized as
the state-of-the-art. To manage the georisks the state-of-the-art method represents an
immediate rockburst warning method based on microseismicity analysis, already utilised
in Digmine. BurstSupport software aiming to assist the geotechnical engineers in
evaluating different rockburst support options in a burst-prone ground was considered as
the state-of-the-art georisk mitigation method identified in the study. Identification of
these developments resulted from rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, selected
keywords and databases. Different choice of these would yield dissimilar results, what
indicates that not all of the research about the topic of interest was identified.
Recommendations and a roadmap addressing upcoming assignments in the ORMID
project are presented in this thesis.