The Influence of Material Layers on the Prediction of Rockfall Hazards for Highwalls

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_60How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Rockfall hazard; Material layers; Open pit mine highwalls; Machine Learning; Parameter uncertainty

Abstract

Understanding rockfall occurrences is crucial for the operation of open-pit mines, as they can compromise the safety of workers and machinery. Designing the most appropriate mitigation measures depends on the energy and position at first impact, as well as the run-out. These “hazard indicators” are generally estimated through rockfall simulations, which require highly uncertain material parameters as input. To model their variability, stochastic simulations are commonly employed to estimate their statistical distributions. However, selecting the most appropriate input material parameters remains a bottleneck in this process. To overcome this hurdle, Senanayake et al. (2024) proposed applying machine learning (ML) data-driven predictions based on synthetic 3D profiles of open pits generated from point cloud models of several highwalls. However, their work only considered a single material with representative average and standard deviation, failing to account for the variability of parameters associated with the rock face geological profile. In this work, two highwalls with different characteristics have been considered to account for such variability by thoroughly characterising the geological profiles and assessing the effect of material layers on rockfall simulations and ML predictions.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Simone Avanzini
AU  - Guilherme Barros
AU  - Abigail Watman
AU  - Davide Ettore Guccione
AU  - Anna Giacomini
AU  - Klaus Thoeni
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/07
TI  - The Influence of Material Layers on the Prediction of Rockfall Hazards for Highwalls
BT  - Proceedings of the Rocscience International Conference 2025 (RIC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 604
EP  - 610
SN  - 2589-4943
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_60
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-900-1_60
ID  - Avanzini2025
ER  -