Evaluation of the total cost of underground transportation in mine development

Abstract

We know from the practice of underground mining of solid mineral resources that transportation is one of the principal mining costs (the cost of carrying minerals, barren rock, equipment, etc. in the tunnels of the mine).Transportation costs can be minimized by optimizing the stripping plan and organizing an efficient transportation of loads.The importance of reducing underground traffic is increased as the mining operations advance to greater depths and is conducted in more difficult conditions. An analysis of this problem in [i], however, has shown that a general solution is difficult.The main source of the difficulties is the lack of a formalized description (models and objective functions) describing the load traffic in underground mines.In 1975 the Institute of Mining of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences formulated for the first time [2] the traffic equations, which allowed evaluating how the location of freight shafts affect overall transportation costs.The equations proceeded from an orthogonal metric of underground traffic streams over the deposit area: