Short and Medium Term Mine Planning in Selective Underground Mining considering Equipment Performance

摘要

Generally, mine planning is undertaken towards the development of production plans using fixed parameters, which provide little flexibility towards changing production plans in case of unplanned events. Therefore, it is important to introduce variables during the planning process, which would allow the mine planning to have a better alignment with real mining conditions and would allow the decrease in the operational uncertainty towards the development of a more agile production plan.The mine layout grows every day but it is very common that the equipment productivity is calculated with fixed parameters, which does not consider the size of the new developments and, thus, it does not consider the changing performance of the equipment, which will affect the mine production because of the associated changes in haulage time, variability in the equipment's tasks and other influences resulting from the changing mine layout.This paper evaluates influence of the changes in the equipment performances over a short- and medium-term mine plans on the mine production. The results show that the change in scheduling and sequencing of the activities and the new mine plan are more realistic when equipment performance is included in the evaluation in comparison with a scheduling that only considers resources constraints. The methodology was developed using tools currently available at the DELPHOS Mine Planning Laboratory, UDESS and DSIM, and by simulating the working scenario with varying performance of the equipment.