Posts Tagged mining
Cracking The Truck Dispatch Problem in Open-Pit Mining to Enhance Competitiveness for the Coal Market
Posted by systems in Discrete Event Modeling, Lean and Green Operations, News, Ports, Logistics and Supply Chain, Research Area, Research Highlights, Technical Area on 16/08/2016
Indonesia is a country which has high diversity in energy and mineral resources. As an archipelago with an area of 1,910,931 km2, Indonesia has some of the pre-eminent resources such as petroleum, natural gas, nickel, coal and others. In coal, Indonesia is listed as one of the largest coal producer in the world in 2014. As one of the highest coal producing countries, Indonesia has a reliance on the use of coal for generating electricity or power plant. This is in line with the Indonesian government program in the long-term energy mix of coal has increased the portion of the year 2013 by 24% to 2025 by 33%. But in fact it actually happened inversely where increased production of domestic coal is not followed by a competitive price.
The existence of weakening coal prices, which decreased from year to year, causing the mining sector, especially companies engaged in coal experienced significant negative impacts. One of the most essential where companies are not experiencing growth on corporate profits, but declined.
Based on these phenomena is the only way for the company to continue running the business activities through efficiency measures on many things to be able to cover operational costs. One of the efficiencies that can be done such efficiency on the operational side. As mentioned by Alarie & Gamache (2002) and Ercelebi & Bascetin (2009) the material transportation represents 50 per cent of the operating costs for an open pit mine. Therefore, one of the efficiencies that can be done and has a substantial impact through efficient on truck dispatching problem in the mine area
SEMS was proposing to overcome this problem using simulation and optimization approach to analyze the complexity of truck dispatch problem in open pit mining. This approach uses the look-ahead algorithm and multi-stage algorithm. Solving the issue focuses on the development of look-ahead methods that will be applied to the truck dispatch problem. Simulation and optimization approach on this issue is run simultaneously with the help of software ProModel as the media to solve the problem. Look-ahead algorithm is an approach to solve the problems of the assignment of the fleet to look ahead what will happen near future with based on previous information system gathered as a reference to decide the scheduling for entities that exist in back of the queue. This research basically to answer the question about where this truck should go now and when it leave this place in order to maximaze amount of coal production. The output of the research is to obtain the best assignment rules for truck dispatch problem with four indicators are, amount of coal production, productivity of loader, productivity truck with block and without block.
Using the model, a significant improvement on amount of production has been achieved to enhance competitiveness coal market.
This research is conducted by Achmad Yusaq Faiz Fadin, Komarudin, and Armand Omar Moeis.