Utilisation-based equipment selection

© 2018, Springer International Publishing AG. When performing equipment selection, we can best account for the operating cost by considering the utilised hours of the equipment. In a surface mine, equipment is often not utilised to full capacity and not accounting for this difference may lead to inferior solutions. In operations such as this, the cost of operating equipment depends on the age of the equipment while the utilisation of equipment is usually based on the equipment cost. The co-dependency of the age of the equipment and the utilisation has provided a barrier to tractable equipment selection models. That is, equipment is rarely utilised in a uniform way, causing the ageing of the equipment (when considering the total hours utilised) to be non-uniform. In our bid to address this issue, we consider a single-location multiple-period mine. We present a mixed-integer linear program that achieves optimal equipment selection and accounts for the equipment utilisation. This model considers pre-existing equipment and allows for heterogeneous fleets. We illustrate our approach on a case study