Waters with mineralization above 1000 mg/dm3, classified as mineral waters, are exploited in many regions of Poland. Their resources are usually not renewable and their excessive exploitation can lead to the deterioration of their physical and chemical properties and negatively affect their quantitative status.
The stages in the life of a groundwater deposit involve prospecting, exploration, development, and exploitation. Deposit management is the basis for a sustainable and economically successful process of using water resources.
The problem of effective management of mineral water deposit management has not been raised so far, which is why the authors decided to address issues that should be taken into account in the abovementioned process. An integrated approach to the prospecting, exploration, opening, and exploitation of mineral waters combining the knowledge of specialists from various disciplines (hydrogeologists, geologists, drillers and producers) will enable the appropriate management of these resources.
The article describes the basic elements of the process, special attention has been paid to the mineral water deposit development plan conditioning the correct and economically justified exploitation of these waters. This plan should take the development strategy and legal and environmental conditions into account. Hydrogeological and mathematical models of mineral water deposits developed as part of the plan provide the basis for determining the extent of the mining area and estimating water resources. The deposit opening, exploitation, and monitoring methods are important elements of the deposit development plan.
The basis for a mineral deposit delimitation is a qualitative and quantitative assessment of deposit parameters, qualifying a deposit as an economically valuable object. A conventional approach to the mineral deposit recognition and a deposit detailed parameters qualification in the initial stages of development work in the KGHM were presented in the paper. The goals of such recognition were defined, which through a gradual detailed expansion, resulting from the information inflow, allows for the construction of a more complete decision-making model. The description of the deposit parameters proposed in the article in the context of fuzzy logic, enables a presentation of imprecise statements and data, which may be a complement to a traditional description. Selected non-adjustable and adjustable s-norm and t-norm operators were demonstrated. Operators effects were tested for selected ore quality parameters (copper content and deposit thickness) by constructing adequate membership functions. In a practical application, the use of chosen fuzzy logic operators is proposed for the assessment of the qualitative parameters of copper-silver ore in the exploitation blocks for one of the mines belonging to KGHM Polish Copper S.A. The considerations have been extended by including the possibility of using compensation operators.