Application of availability importance measure for system bottleneck determination (case study: Golgohar-e Sirjan iron mine)

Trucks are the main hauling machinery in open pit mines. High capital and operational cost requires accurate management and high efficiency of this equipment, this circumstance depends on the accurate understanding of the system and its behavior in different operating conditions. “Importance measure” approach is one of the useful methods that prioritizes system or implement it from different perspectives such as up and down time aiding the engineers for better decision making about management and resource allocating. Reliability, availability and maintainability (RAM) importance measure are combination of system behavior and importance, that by analyzing up and down time prioritizes and detection bottleneck of system. In this paper, a comprehensive approach based on availability importance measure for increase performance of a truck from Golgohar mine has been suggested. In this truck, transmission and body subsystem are identified as most and least important subsystem from availability point of view respectively. Also, transmission maintainability has major contribution for increasing system availability.