SIMULATION-BASED OPTIMIZATION OF MAINTENANCE CREW CONFIGURATION IN MINING OPERATIONS

2022-2
Şahiner, Şahin Furkan
A mining company is expected to have three essential assets which are human resources, ore reserve to be exploited, and an equipment fleet. On this basis, trucks, excavators, drilling machines, crushers, mills, classifiers, and concentrators are commonly covered in mining equipment fleets. On the other hand, human resource employed in operational activities is vital for labor-intensive production industries like mining. Here, the number and qualifications of people employed in a mining site should be decided according to the divisional capacity requirements allocated to different operational branches. Among these divisions, the maintenance facility is generally one of the most labor-intensive parts since a maintenance crew configuration requires a vast number of people with different qualifications to ensure the equipment fleet's performability. In this regard, the current research study aims to develop a continuous-event simulation model to optimize the maintenance crew's configuration, i.e. capacity and qualification, for an operable mining area where different clusters of failure modes are available for multiple equipment working coordinately for joint production. The developed model was implemented for a five-excavator fleet employed in a surface coal mine. The model input dataset covered three years records of maintenance works classified in mechanical and electrical failure types. The simulation outcomes showed that the total cost of indirect and direct financial consequences of maintenance crew could be minimized for a crew including six persons in the electrical division and four persons in the mechanical division. Moreover, the downtime profiles of the excavators for this optimized scenario were also evaluated. The analysis showed that Excavator ID-31 is expected to be down most among the five excavators for the observation period.

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Citation Formats
Ş. F. Şahiner, “SIMULATION-BASED OPTIMIZATION OF MAINTENANCE CREW CONFIGURATION IN MINING OPERATIONS,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.