Methodological Principles of Risk Management at Mining Enterprises under Uncertainty of the Environment

In conditions of uncertainty and high dynamics of the operating environment of a mining enterprise, the operation of its mine engineering system must ensure timely response (reactions) adequate to the impact of the internal and external environments. At the same time, the most crucial characteristics of a mine engineering system in a turbulent external environment are efficiency, safety, and environmental friendliness, whose conflict constantly intensifies. The article considers two characteristics of the system, i.e., efficiency and production safety, and the tasks to ensure them may often contradict each other. It is possible to reduce or mitigate the impact of this conflict on the production activities of an enterprise using production risk management. Based on the analysis of the operation of mining enterprises in the sphere of accident and injury risk management and methods applied within the framework of production safety system functioning, the main tendencies, specifics, and regularities of risk management have been determined. This allowed for the substantiation of principles necessary and sufficient for risk management under uncertainty of the environment of operation of mining enterprises: production conditions are always changeable, therefore, the parameters of the mine engineering system deviate from the design values and the scheduled operation mode; the object of control at risk management is a production situation; a production emergency as a manifestation of dual nature of risk reveals both profits and losses. The implementation of the suggested principles is possible on the condition of control over production risk including all factors affecting employees of different occupations during their work and uniting both economic (non-compliance with production program, accidents, production downtime) and social risks (injuries, temporary disabilities). The account of the established regularity of the occurrence of production emergencies at design, planning, and production activities at a mining enterprise will ensure an acceptable level of production risk for mining operations.