Abstract

This paper shows some interesting innovations produced during the development of a commercial package for resource evaluation initiated by the University of Chile with a Government Grant in association with Codelco Chile and Gemcom Software International as counterparts. The software provides geostatistical estimation and simulation tools for evaluation and uncertainty management in resources and reserves of ore deposits. The computational routines are based in publicly available code and tools developed for specific purposes by university researchers. The main innovations described are related to the spatial search of data for interpolation and simulation, the improvement in the solution of linear systems of equations in a kriging context, and a solution to the problem of simulating grades at a block support from point support grade sample data. Examples are provided to demonstrate the improvements achieved and the potential impact they may have in a full resource evaluation