ABSTRACT
Mehdi Abad lead-zinc deposits situated between Yazd-Kerman provinces and some 550 Km far from Tehran in central part of Iran. During last 50 years the upper part of this deposit has been worked and now the deeper part of that (230-330 deep) are planning to exploit, with open pit or under ground methods which one is more profitable and feasible. During last years between different designers there was a very big contradiction to make a choice between surface and underground. In this paper after reviewing all the efforts in the past for method selection, geological and geotechnical factors affecting extraction method, are evaluated and finally open pit has rejected empirically because of very high stripping ratio, some about 26/1 which is around 5-6 times the country’s average. Finally, while the existing shortcoming of numerical methods such as Hartman, Nicolas, UBC and MMS lead to wrong results in the process of suitable mining method selection, analytical method do not have such shortcomings. “Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Decision Making”, as one of the analytical models, might be a good solution to the problems of mining method selection. Using this method in block 1 of Mehdi Abad mine it was recognized that room and pillar method would be appropriate.
