Evaluation of the Economic Performance Index for Loading and Hauling Fleet in Open-Pit Mines

Loading and hauling operations have the highest share of the production costs of open-pit mines. Therefore, in choosing the loading and hauling machines, paying attention to the economic aspects is necessary. For a better understanding of the financial performance of mining machinery, various performance indicators have been proposed by researchers. This research presents a special form of economic performance index, which indicates the ratio of each machine's revenue to its total cost. For this purpose, the cost and revenue of the transport fleet, including dump trucks, mining shovels, and backhoe excavators, were collected for two years (From September 2017 to September 2019) and determined. As the first step, the total cost and the amount of revenue from the operation of each machine then, the Economic Performance Index (EPI) for each of the loading and hauling machines is calculated and compared with each other. The results show that Backhoe excavators perform better than mining shovels. In addition, by examining different trucks from different manufacturers, it was found that C100 series trucks have the best performance among all trucks. Its average economic performance index value for each of those trucks is 2.82.