A precise knowledge of the extracted zone in complex combinations of drawpoints is however crucial to optimize ore recovery in underground mining when applying the well-known ‘‘block caving method’’ A sketch of the common geometry used in block caving is presented in Fig. 1.In this method, a large number of hoppers are organized in a periodic lattice in which the geometry and distance between neighbors intend to optimize the global extraction process. Besides the size of hopper apertures and the distance between hoppers, an important parameter is the average size of granulates which might strongly influence the average size of the IEZ. In turn, the geometry of the IEZ tells us to what extent any two neighboring IEZs might interact.