Optimization of Truck-Shovel Allocation Problem in Open-Pit Mines

The use of an optimized dispatching system for the haul trucks in an open-pit mine plays a crucial role to increase the production, especially with the introduction of autonomous trucks into the mine. This involves managing the entire transport system in order to reduce the mine’s operating costs and enhance the mine efficiency. This paper presents a trucks-shovel dispatching model that performs the first phase of a mining fleet management system (production optimization and allocation planning) and which is developed in two main steps. The first step proposes a modeling of the allocation of shovels problem as a vehicle routing problem. In the second step, a mixed integer linear programming model is proposed to determine the optimal number of trips required to transport the quantity of ore from each loading point to each dumping site, this model is used to dispatch available trucks to the appropriate shovel. The feature of the proposed models is that they include the assignment of shovels which is generally ignored and left to the task’s dispatcher. The second specificity is that they take into account a heterogeneous fleet of trucks and shovels with different capacities. For validation, a case study using the developed models in a Moroccan mining company is presented and discussed.