This thesis is aimed at studying the open pit truck- shovel haulage systems using computer simulation approach. The main goal of the study is to enhance the analysis and comparison of heuristic truck dispatching policies currently available and search for an adaptive rule applicable to open pit mines. For this purpose, a stochastic truck dispatching and production simulation program is developed for a
medium size open pit mine consisting of several production faces and a single dump site using GPSS/H software. Eight basic rules are modeled in separate program files. The program considers all components of truck cycle and normal
distribution is used to model all these variables. The program asks the user to enter the number of trucks initially assigned to each shovel site.
Full-factorial simulation experiments are made to investigate the effects of several factors including the dispatching rules, the number of trucks operating, the number of shovels operating, the variability in truck loading, hauling and return
times, the distance between shovels and dump site, and availability of shovel and truck resources. The breakdown of shovel and trucks are modeled using exponential distribution. Three performance measures are selected as truck production, overall shovel utilization and overall truck utilizations. Statistical analysis of the simulation experiments is done using ANOVA method with Minitab software. Regression analysis gives coefficient of determination values,
R2, of 56.7 %, 84.1 %, and 79.6 % for the three performance measures, respectively. Also, Tukey&rsquo / s method of mean comparison test is carried out to compare the basic dispatching rules. From the results of statistical analysis, it is
concluded that the effects of basic truck dispatching rules on the system performance are not significant. But, the main factors affecting the performances are the number of trucks, the number of shovels, the distance between the shovels
and dump site, finally the availability of shovel and truck resources. Also, there are significant interaction effects between these main factors. Finally, an adaptive rule
using the standardized utilization of shovels and trucks is developed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12605499/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 October 2004 |
| Creators | Cetin, Necmettin |
| Contributors | Bolukbasi, Naci |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Ph.D. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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