Abstract:

Decision-Making (DM) is the first and one of the most important stages in the design or project procedure of mining engineering operations like other engineering professions. Every mining engineer might make precise decisions in all mining operations such as the selection of mining method, equipment, facility location, support type, mine planning and design, etc. There are a number of techniques available for solving different type of decision problems in the literature. In this paper, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), which is the one of the Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) techniques, was used to solve two independent mining based decision problems related to selection of equipment and facility location. As the decisions in the both facility location and equipment selection haveradically influenced the economic life of any mining scenario, they are considered as complexMADM problem. After introducing the Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) togetherwith its subgroups MADM and Multiple Objective Decision Making (MODM) methods, theTOPSIS method and its algorithm were explained in this paper shortly. The TOPSIS has notbeen extensively used to model decisions pertaining to the mining applications although mostoften it has been used for DM on corporate level. So, it was aimed to apply this method for twodifferent mining operations. The TOPSIS method was used for a loader selection by considering the data obtained from Turkish Coal Enterprises (TKI) and a facility location selection for Marble Factory according to the data obtained from ELMAS Company in Turkey

Keywords: