On Friday, March 13th, 2020, Magister's student in Mining at Delphos Laboratory, Héctor González, successfully passed his grade exam, titled: Selection of assignment of carguío equipment for the fulfillment of an open pit mining production plan through a simulation and optimization methodology. His evaluating commission consisted of Nelson Morales, Manuel Reyes, and Andrés Parra.  

The work carried out seeks to guide the allocation of equipment and the generation of production plans. By incorporating a simulation model, together with an equipment allocation methodology, it was possible to capture the uncertainty of shovel-truck systems and achieve an adequate allocation of irrigation equipment, managing to minimize operating costs such as ensuring compliance with a production plan.

Two different exercises were developed. First, a catalog of loading equipment was available and the model managed to decide which of them to use in each iteration; in the second, there was no freedom of selection of equipment, so the model had to work with the same equipment in each iteration. The objective of these different exercises was to study the applicability of the methodology raised in different project contexts: the first case (free equipment) considered a "Greenfield" project, or carried out from scratch, while the case of fixed equipment is placed in a "Brownfield" project, in which the current situation of the operation limits decisions.

Among the main results obtained is that an improvement is achieved for the exercise of varied equipment, concerning the base case, from 83% to 99% in the total extraction, which is achieved including new equipment. On the other hand, it's impossible to exceed 86% of the base plan extraction for the exercise of fixed equipment. Then, however, a new extraction plan (with less material) is generated in which the assignment even achieves a 100% extraction of the planned material.

Implementing the proposed methodology improves the accuracy with which equipment productivity is estimated, going from a productivity overestimation of 44% in the base case to 0.3%. With this improvement, you can generate production plans whose extraction has greater reliability than manual equipment assignments.

Hector was our last student to defend his thesis before the COVID-19 crisis reached our country. Congratulations to the new Master in Mining!