Application of Imperialistic Competitive Algorithm for Optimizing movement Rate in Songun Copper Mine Transportation System

Optimization of haulage system in open pit mines is very important due to its high operating costs. Till now a large no. of researches have been conducted to optimize the truck fleet size in an open pit mine in dispatching and non-dispatching modes. These researches have gained many achievements in this regard and still they are going to continue. On the other hand, nowadays, application of artificial intelligence is spreading vastly to optimize systems in the field of (mining) engineering, especially in np-hard problems. One of the new meta-heuristic algorithms in engineering field is Imperialistic Competition (IC), which is developed primarily for electrical systems. Recently, it has found its application in the field of mining systems as well. In this paper, application of IC algorithm for optimization of haulage system in open pit mines is introduced. Implementation of the IC algorithm for Songon Copper mine was validated with comparison of its results with those of Genetic algorithm. Comparison showed promising results. Optimization of the system with IC algorithm improves the mine production from 32 thousand tons as the current situation to 37 thousand tons, while optimization of the system with Genetic algorithm improves the mine production to 35 thousand tones.