Evaluating the strategies of the Iranian mining sector using a integrated model

Mining plays a critical role in most countries and acts as a foundation for growth and development producing raw material for other sectors such as industry and agriculture. So, determining and prioritizing mining strategies is very important. Various tools are used to determine and evaluate operational strategies. Analyzing the internal and external environments using a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is useful in determining the current situation and in identifying the major prospects and challenges that could significantly impact strategy implementation in the mining sector. Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are appropriate tools to prioritize in a sophisticated environmental with the analytical network process (ANP) and the VIKOR two MCDM methods that are used in several research papers. In this paper, we propose an integrated model for prioritizing the Iranian mining sector strategies. A SWOT analysis was conducted to assign enforceable strategies; then, the ANP was applied to determine the SWOT factor weights. Finally the strategies were ranked using the VIKOR technique. The results show that improving exploitation ability and production outperforms other strategies.

SWOT, ANP, VIKOR, mining strategies