Equipment Replacement Analysis of Manual Trucks with Autonomous Truck Technology in Open Pit Mines

This paper proposes an Integer Programming (IP) algorithm to evaluate the feasibility of replacing existing truck fleet with the autonomous trucks for any given mine layouts and for any given production targets. Truck productivity is estimated by integrating haul road profiles of sequential production periods to equipment performance which variates year to year. Two comparative cases are built separately in the study for autonomous and manual operations. For each case, an optimal fleet configuration with long-term replacement policy is obtained by minimizing material haulage cost while meeting the production requirement for the mine. The algorithm gives comparative results for both cases. A general review on equipment replacement and autonomous trucks is also provided in the paper with some remarkable statistics gathered for operations using autonomous trucks