In mining, the objective is to economically exploit the ore while taking into account safety of work force and machineries. However, generating wastes which contaminate actual ore, so-called dilution, drastically affect direct and indirect costs of mining [1]. Dilution significantly influences the cost of a stope and hence mining profitability as it not only increases costs associated with the stope, but also affects all other cost components incurred by exploitation, transportation, crushing, milling and handling as well as those of the operations to be performed on valueless wastes or low-grade rocks of insignificant value. Moreover, the extra time spent on cutting and filling large stopes developed as a result of wastes ends up with unplanned delays and renewal costs [2].

Dilution reduces revenues of mining projects. Waste exploitation, transportation and processing are costly operations. In fact, each unit of dilution-resulted waste replaces a highly profitable unit of ore in production capacity of the mine. For example, in a gold mine with a processing capacity of 360,000 tons/year, taking average grade of the mineral reserve, gold price, and total operational cost to be 0.35 ounces of gold per ton, 350 USD per ounce and 83.86 USD per ton, respectively, the difference in total revenue between two scenarios with 15% and 20% of dilution level will exceed 4 million dollars per year; further, recovery percentage of the corresponding mineral dressing plant will reduce from 95% to 94.4% as the dilution increases from 15% to 20% [3]. Investigation of the effect of dilution on profitability of a gold vein mine showed that, the mine would lose its profitability at dilution levels exceeding 40%, ending up with some loss [4]. Investigating economic losses incurred by dilution in a thin vein tungsten mine in China, where cut-and-fill stoping method was used to exploit the mine, showed that, 44.4% of the losses incurred by dilution were avoidable [5]. Costs associated with 14% dilution in a gold mine were determined to be about 38 USD per ton. In a year, this sumed up to 5.4 million USD [6].

Various parameters are involved in the development of unplanned dilution in underground stopes. These parameters are divided into three groups of geological parameters (such as ore thickness, stress conditions, quality of walls and roof  of stope, stope depth, discontinuities and their position relative to walls), design and engineering parameters (such as stope geometry, blast parameters and under cutting) and operational parameters (such as tonnage of planned production, extraction rate and production sequence) [7].