Real-time truck dispatching in open-pit mines

Real-time truck dispatching is an important function of the open-pit mine transportation system. However, most of the existing methods are not comprehensive enough to consider the optimisation of both full truck hauling and empty truck travelling stages. Further, most of the real-time dispatching criteria are fixed, which cannot meet the variety of production requirements. To address the above problems, we consider both full and empty truck dispatching, and different from previous studies, we develop a real-time dispatching model with two parts for heterogeneous fleets in open-pit mines: a full truck dispatching model for truck-finished loading at the loading place, and an empty truck dispatching model for truck-finished dumping at the dumping place. Specifically, the proposed model has three goals for minimisation: (a) the waiting time of the trucks, (b) the deviation from the planned path flow rate, and (c) the transportation cost. Furthermore, the weights of the three sub-objectives can be changed to meet the production requirements for different real scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed model can achieve a higher production by at least 14% and decrease the cost by at least 6% and has better adaptability to different production requirements.