A New Methodology for Prioritizing Mining Strategies

Mining plays one critical role in most countries and it acts as a foundation for growth and development. It produces raw material for other sectors such as industry, agriculture, etc. So, determining and prioritizing the strategies of mining are so important. Miscellaneous types of tools are offered for determining and evaluating of operational strategies. Analyzing the internal and external environments using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) helps to determine the current situation and to identify major prospects and challenges that could significantly impact strategy implementation in mining sector. Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are appropriate tools to prioritize under sophisticated and environment. Analytical network process (ANP) and VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) are two hands of MCDM methods that are able to rank alternatives in decision problems with conflicting criteria. The main aim of this paper is to develop an integrated model based on SWOT, ANP, and VIKOR to prioritize the strategies of the Iranian mining sector. We employed the SWOT analysis to determine enforceable strategies; then, ANP was applied in order to obtain the weight of SWOT factors, finally the strategies were ranked by VIKOR technique. The results of proposed model show that improving the ability of exploitation and production outperforms other strategies.

SWOT, ANP, VIKOR, Mining Strategies.