Improvements in plan-driven truck dispatching systems for surface mining

© 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, London. Truck dispatching systems have been widely used since the 1970s for truck assignments in open pit mines, in order to coordinate material movement from diggers to process plants and stockpiles. Existing commercial solutions are commonly plan-driven systems, which operate by making real-time truck assignments while maintaining conformance to an established haulage allocation plan. Such systems typically comprise programming models to deter-mine the allocation plan as a set of material flow rates. A significant limitation of these methods is that they optimise flow rates only for instantaneous production. These approaches ignore upcoming events and changes in availability and performance, limiting the ability to optimise flows around such events. The method proposed in this paper extends existing approaches by modelling material flows over a future time-horizon, incorporating upcoming events, disrup-tions, and changes in resources. Results are presented comparing an established algorithm with the proposed method, showing improved handling of disruption events