Development of Truck Dispatching System for Open Pit Mine Operations

摘要

In recent years, there has been considerable effort in optimization of long-term and shortterm open pit mine plans to maximize the NPV of a given mining project. Based on the geological information and economic parameters, the "optimized" long-term plans can be generated, which provide yearly mining areas. Using the "optimized" long-term plans as guidance, the short-term plans are generated to identify monthly, weekly or daily mining areas. In open pit mine operations where the truck shovel system is utilized, a number of loading units and trucks are allocated to the operations and trucks are assigned to different loading units in real time to execute the short-term plans. The allocations and real time assignments can be done through truck dispatching systems provided to the industry by Modular Mining's "DISPATCH~R" or Caterpillar's "Mine Star~R". This paper will describe the use of Linear Programming (LP) based optimization algorithms in truck dispatching. This paper will also describe various approaches to be used in truck dispatching schemes to synchronize the actual material movement under the existence of uncertainties and the complexities of mine operations to the "optimized" mine plans.