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Top1. Introduction
The process of selecting an underground mining method to excavate the ore deposits depends on many factors including geometry, economic and safety. The selection of an appropriate mining method for a specific ore deposit is made at the planning stage. Once the mining starts with the selected method, it is difficult to alter at the later stage. Mining method selection completely depends on the types of geometry and geo-mechanical characteristics of the deposit (Azadeh, Osanloo, & Ataei, 2010). There is always uncertainty exist in the variables. In the last few decades, many qualitative approaches have been developed for the selection of the mining method (Boshkov & Wright, 1973; Morrison, 1976; Hamrin, 1982; Hartman, 1987). Nicholas (1981) introduced the first numerical-based approach for mining method selection. The proposed method used a simple weighting process of the defined criteria to select the best mining method. In this method, all the criteria were assumed to have equal importance and thus equal weights were assigned to each criterion. Miller-Tait, Panalkis, & Poulin (1995) modified the Nicholas technique by changing the minimum and maximum scores and inclusion of RMR parameters without consideration of the weights of the criteria. Thereafter, many researchers have developed the different multi-criteria decision-making techniques in prioritising the mining method (Samimi Namin, Shahriar, Ataee-Pour, & Dehghani, 2008; Mikaeil et al, 2009; Naghadehi, Mikaeil, & Ataei, 2009; Gupta & Kumar, 2012; Ataei, Shahsavany, & Mikaeil, 2013; Yavuz, 2014; Balusa & Gorai, 2018; Fu, Wu, Liao, & Herrera, 2018; Balusa & Gorai, 2019a; Weizhang, Guoyan, & Changshou, 2019; Balusa & Gorai, 2019b; Banda, 2020). The characteristics of all the studies are summarized in Table 1.