In general, automation is most effectively applied to repetitive tasks, such as production loading and trucking. The significant presence of these highly repetitive tasks in a cave mining environment make automation particularly attractive. The increasing automation of mining equipment is the natural evolution of basic tele-remote operation. The primary benefit of tele-remote mining is in
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Cave mining, and in particular block-cave mining, stands at one end of the spectrum of mining method-related risks. It is not so much that the risks are greater, but rather that the ability of management to respond to variations in expected conditions is much less than with other mining methods. Compounding this in the case
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Many ore deposits extend vertically, a fact which is not always known at the start of mining. If initial mining is by opencast methods and ore reserves are proven to greater depths, the pits are often planned to go deeper than originally envisaged. In such cases, surface plants and critical underground facilities — conveyor tunnels,
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