EFFICIENCY IMPROVEMENT OF THE SONGUN COPPER MINE FLEET USING SIMULATION TECHNIQUE

Fleet selection in open-pit mines is of vital importance. Inappropriate selection of fleet can be influential on the project economics in two ways; failure in achieving production objectives and increase the attributed costs due to increase in the shipment time. Usually fleet design is fulfilled in the forms of either allocating or dispatching aiming to production maximization and cost minimization. Simulation technique, one of the available fleet selection methods, allows designers to study a system in a virtual environment without executing it in the real world, to technically and economically evaluate its efficiency. In this paper, at first using the simulation technique, transportation system of the Songun copper mine was simulated in the Arena software and then by defining new systems, efficiency of the available fleet was improved. On the basis of the obtained results it was observed that a fleet of 100 t dump trucks, 6.1 m3 front end loaders, 7.0 m3 shovel and 4.6 m3 excavator with weekly production of 550,000 tones and 0.83$ per/ m3 is the best possible alternative.