Motivated by the dispatching of trucks to shovels in surface mines, we study optimal routing in a Markovian finite-source, multi-server queueing system with heterogeneous servers, each with a separate queue. We formulate the problem of routing customers to servers to maximize the system throughput as a Markov Decision Process. When the servers are homogenous, we demonstrate that the Shortest Qu...

This paper describes the development of an algorithm that is able to track the pose of a vehicle as it approaches a rotating platform with a number of scanning range lasers. The target application is path planning and traffic management systems that are able to assist drivers of mining trucks when parking their vehicles with respect to loading machinery (ie. swing-loaders, rope-shovels and exca...

An Unattainable Salvation Dirt, Danger & Domesticity in Old New York It was 1832, and in the Five Points area of New York, a great street excavation was under way. What would cause such a flurry over the cobbles? Here, shovels plied the earth decades before the subway tunneled beneath the crowded streets. Electrical poles and telegraph lines had yet to become a nuisance worthy of inhumation. No...

Driverless haulage trucks have recently been developed for open pit mines. To predict the benefits of an Autonomous Haulage System (AHS), a deterministic/stochastic model has been created to compare AHS to a manual system by estimating benchmarked Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as productivity, safety, breakdown frequencies, maintenance and labor costs, fuel consumption, tire wear, and ...

The selection of soil development is generally guided by the need to treat a certain area site in shortest time and with least effort energy. In small household plots, grant carried out hand garden shovels without use mechanized or electromechanized means. Such blades have sharp metal extended tip wooden shaft. They are widely used due their relative cheapness, but they low productivity because...

The operation quality of shovel-truck systems (STSs) at open-pit coal mines in the summer and transitional autumn-spring periods differs markedly. This is due to a decrease speed haul trucks during season compared season. leads an increase travel time trucks. Shovels must work longer ensure planned volumes loading transportation required number hauls. Consequently, duration working shift (or da...