Real-time Path Planning of Driver-less Mining Trains with Time-dependent Physical Constraints

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time, mixed integer programming-based framework for optimizing driver-less mining train schedules considering time-dependent physical constraints, aiming to enhance efficiency and reduce costs in open pit mines.

Contribution

It formulates a multi-objective optimization problem for mine railway scheduling with physical constraints and develops an online solution capable of real-time scheduling.

Findings

The proposed solution efficiently generates train schedules in real-time.

Experimental results show improved operational efficiency and cost reduction.

The framework effectively handles NP-hard scheduling problems in mining operations.

Abstract

While the increased automation levels of production and operation equipment have led to improved productivity of mining activity in open pit mines, the capacity of mine transport system become a bottleneck. The optimization of mine transport system is of great practical significance to reduce the production and operation cost and improve the production and organizational efficiency of mines. In this paper we first formulate a multi-objective optimisation problem for mine railway scheduling by introducing a set of mathematical constraints. As the problem is NP-hard, we then devise a Mixed Integer Programming based solution to solve this problem, and develop an online framework accordingly. We finally conduct test cases to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution is efficient and able to generate train schedule in a real-time manner.