Evolution and future prospect of scientific objectives of open-pit mining

Surface mining is an important way of mining mineral resources. The state and local governments have put forward higher requirements for surface mining in China. Therefore, it is particularly urgent to take surface mining as a science to carry out systematic research, reveal the laws of mining process and phenomenon occurred, and make scientific explanations. First of all, the major technical achievements in the field of surface mining of solid mineral resources in China in the past 40 years were summarized from three aspects: the basic theory of surface mining, the development of key complete sets of equipment and blasting engineering technology. Then, the modern scientific metrology and information metrology technologies were used to conduct a multivariate dynamic analysis of 7128 papers and reports in the past 40 years, and a multi-dimensional quantitative description of the development and evolution process of the main research topics, including the time dimension, was carried out by the cluster analysis.