Maintenance Schedules of Mining HEMM Using an Optimization Framework Model

Abstract

The mining industry is an asset intrinsic industry and continuous increase in demand of the mineral/ore as per production target requires increased availability and productivity of the equipment. The continuous innovation over the years in maintenance practice from breakdown to now prescriptive maintenance is improving the equipment availability and increasing the productivity. The mining industry is still lagging compared to manufacturing industries in terms of equipment utilization. Earlier, the production operations schedules were based on equipment manufacturer's guidance and some configured software insights were taken into consideration. To assess and enhance the equipment performance, additional insights are considered for determining the maintenance schedule dates. This paper details the optimization framework model for managing the schedule of the movable mining equipment of open cast mines to improve the availability and productivity of the mining equipment. The enhanced framework is applied to multiple attributes which helps in deriving the maintenance schedules which in turn optimizes the usage of maintenance resources. The availability of maintenance resources at a specific point of time allows efficient equipment allocation in workshop bays resulting in optimized maintenance schedules and enhanced equipment availability for production operations. The new key performance indicators can be measured as "Mean Time of Preventive Maintenance" and "Mean Time of Overall Maintenance" which will plot the maintenance schedule pattern for analysis and will combine the planned and unplanned maintenance schedules, subsequently improving the availability of the mining equipment and resulting in higher productivity.