Is Truck Queuing Productive?

Study of truck & shovel operations productivity using simulation platform MineDES

Dmitry Kostyuk
Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation
25 November 2014
Contents

Simulation Modeling in Mine Planning

Truck and shovel operations simulation platform MineDES

• Overview
• Advantages
• Benchmarking and validation

Case Study

Conclusions

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 2
Mine Planning Challenges

• Mines will continue to increase in depth, scale and complexity.

• There is a strong demand for mine planners to:
–Produce achievable, optimized plans for these mines
–Appropriately size equipment fleets
–Design efficient, effective mine access systems
–Accurately estimate mining system productivity
• Getting it wrong can negatively impact project NPV.

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 3
Conventional Mine Planning

• Analytical methods – formula-based approach

• High-level of abstraction – BIG PICTURE point of view
• Normally doesn’t account for the impact on overall mining system productivity
such factors as equipment interactions, parameters variability, randomness,
uncertainty etc…
• Fails to describe systems with dynamic behavior featuring:
– non-linear behavior
– non-intuitive influences between variables
– time and causal dependencies
– uncertainty, randomness and large number of parameters
Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 4
Mine Planning using Simulation Modeling

Simulation Modeling
• Method of solving problems that
can’t be calculated analytically
• Cheap and risk free experiments
(“what if ?” studies)
• Efficient for analyzing systems with
dynamic behavior

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 5
Analytical Modeling vs. Simulation Modeling

Queuing theory
Single loader
Poisson stream (independent arrivals)
Arrivals: on average
trucks / hour

Case #1: Case #2:

Loading time exponentially distributed: Loading time arbitrary distributed:

1/ – mean loading time 1/ – mean loading time

Shovel utilization: Shovel utilization:

Average waiting time: Average waiting time: ,
Average queue length: where is coefficient of variation of
loading time.

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 6
Analytical Modeling vs. Simulation Modeling

Queuing theory
Multiple (K) loaders
Poisson stream (independent arrivals)

Arrivals: on average
trucks / hour

Case #3: Case #4:

Loading time exponentially distributed: Loading time arbitrary distributed:
1/ – mean loading time 1/ – mean loading time
Shovel utilization:
Average waiting time: ,
ANALYTICAL SOLUTION
where P
! , DOES NOT EXIST STARTING
FROM HERE AND FOR ANY
and ∑ FURTHER COMPLICATION
! !
OF THE PROCESS!!!

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 7
Advantages of Simulation Modeling

• Enabling system analysis, and to find solutions where other methods fail

• Once appropriate level of abstraction is selected, development of a simulation model is a more

straightforward process than analytical modeling – less intellectual efforts, scalable, incremental
and modular

• The structure of a simulation model naturally reflects the structure of the real system – it is
visual, easy to verify and communicate to other people

• Any state of the model is measurable and any entity, which is not below abstraction level is
tractable – sensitivity analysis, statistical analysis

• Ability to play and animate the system

• Simulation models are a lot more convincing than Excel spreadsheets or Power Point slides

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 8
Contents

Simulation Modeling in Mine Planning

Truck and shovel operations simulation platform MineDES

• Overview
• Advantages
• Benchmarking and validation

Case Study

Conclusions

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 9
MineDES - What is it?

• Truck & shovel operations simulation tool that can be used to estimate mining movement and
processing capability in the following dimensions:
– productivity statistics
– bottleneck processes and infrastructure
– truck queuing statistics
– the impact of different crew and maintenance schedules
– the impact of unscheduled random equipment and road sector downtime
– the influence of road maintenance vehicles and light vehicles on congestion
– the capacity of particular pit ramps, and the whole road network, to support planned material
movements.
• Primary design concept was to focus application on addressing strategic mine planning
questions, but secondly to be applicable in the short term planning environment.

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 10
Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 11
 MineDES Features

• Truck dynamics are calculated using full rim-pull curve data,

taking into account truck payload as well as road gradient and
quality
• A fast, purpose-built simulation engine, and the modelling of
trucks as agents to ensure realistic and intelligent behavior
• Truck dispatch is predicated upon attempting to achieve a
user-defined mining rate at each mining face
• Realistic and flexible modelling of traffic rules at complex
intersections
• Modelling of payload and loading/dumping time variability

• Flexibility in assigning legal digging and dumping destinations to different truck sets within each truck fleet
• The optional application of a wide range of scheduled and unscheduled downtime for all mobile and static
material processing infrastructure.
• Integrated 3D visualization engine

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 12
Advantages of truck & shovel simulator MineDES

• In-house software development project

with more than 4 years development
history.
• Developed from scratch and doesn’t use
any commercial simulation engines.
• Designed to address both long- and short-
term mine planning problems
• Intuitive, flexible and fit for purpose.
Development of a simulation scenario is
straightforward process, which does not
require programming skills and a lot of
intellectual effort.
• Benchmarked against other industry
standard software products and tested in
real operations environment

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 13
MineDES Benchmarking and Validation

Truck dynamics model benchmarking against

industry standard software
50
45
40
35

Truck speed (km/h)

30
MineDES
25
TALPAC
20
15
10
5
0
Distance (km)
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6

600 m

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 14
 Testing against real truck data.

GPS real truck data plot: MineDES model - design view: Experiment results:
Truck ground speed profile. GPS vs. MineDES
40
115.4
35

Truck speed (km/h)

30
115.2
25
20
115
15

114.8 10
5
114.6 0
Y (km)

0 5 10 15 20

114.4 Truck travel distance profile. GPS vs. MineDES

4.5
4
114.2 3.5

Distance (km)
3
114 2.5
2
113.8 1.5
1
113.6 0.5
17 17.2 17.4 17.6 17.8 18 18.2 0
X (km) 0 5 10 15 20
Travel time (min)

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 15
Contents

Simulation Modeling in Mine Planning

Truck and shovel operations simulation platform MineDES

• Overview
• Advantages
• Benchmarking and validation

Case Study

Conclusions

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 16
Case Study. Optimal fleet size.

Truck Loading Time Distribution Graph [sec]:

Truck Payload Distribution Graph [tonnes]:

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 17
Case Study. Optimal fleet size.

• A minimum 8 trucks are required to

maximize productivity.
• Adding more trucks to the fleet simply
increases overall queuing time with no
additional aggregate material movement
- in fact, adding extra trucks above 8
can lead to an insignificant decrease in
productivity (< 1%) due to increased
traffic congestion.

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 18
 Case Study. Optimal fleet size

The simulation experiment has shown that even in a simple case where non-deterministic behaviour is quite limited and the road
network is simple (point-to-point), in an optimized configuration, we should expect to see trucks queuing at shovels to a not
insubstantial extent. The simple financial model shows that this queuing is protective of productivity and operational value.

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 19
Conclusions

• A new truck-shovel simulation tool called MineDES has been introduced

• A simulation case study was undertaken using MineDES to address the
question of whether having queuing trucks could be a feature of an optimally
productive mining operation.
• Our experiments have shown that in the case where non-deterministic factors
are present in the system, typical of all real mining operations to a greater or
lesser extent, then some degree of truck queuing will be observed in the most
productive of configurations.

Dmitry Kostyuk, Specialist Scientist, Group Resource and Business Optimisation, 25 November 2014 Slide 20