ABSTRACT
Geological structures, such as faults, are major concern to the longwall design, planning and management. The uncertainty of fault systems could cause substantial monetary losses if its risk is not assessed and managed adequately. A methodology for quantifying and assessing fault uncertainty and integrating quantified information in longwall design and planning has been developed. The methodology is based on the stochastic simulation to generate multiple equal-probable realisations of fault populations which reproduce observed faults, honour the statistics of the fault attributes, and respect the constraints from soft information, providing the means to thereby model and assess the related fault uncertainty. Integrating fault uncertainty into longwall design and planning is a very important new concept and has many advantages. The fault uncertainty information can be used in longwall layout, longwall scheduling, and operation management. This paper briefly summaries the method of stochastic fault simulation and then discuss the application of quantified information in longwall design and planning.
