Simulation Tool to Analyze the Productivity and Energy Consumption of Electric Mining Vehicles

EasyChair Preprint 5206

Abstract

The transfer from conventional mining methods toward digitalization, automation and electrification is going on worldwide. The mining process efficiency needs to be improved in the future, because the mines are in more difficult places, far away from the infrastructure and very deep underground hence the high profitability is more difficult to achieve. Therefore, the mining process needs to be more energy efficient in the future to keep the business profitable. Accurate information about the productivity and process optimization is needed to achieve suitable decisions. The operation of mine needs to be modeled to find the most critical aspects in reliability and productivity point of view. In this study, an electric grid and mining vehicle traffic simulator, called MineGame, is created to model, visualize and study fleet-level operation of mine with simplified physics. Open source coding software is used to create easy-to-use tool to support complex decision making. MineGame enables the analyze of productivity and energy consumption of varying mining machine fleets, mine layouts, task management decisions and traffic rules. Engineers, who design mine operation, sale persons of mining devices and trainers may use MineGame.

Keyphrases: electric vehicle, mining, modeling, off-road vehicle, simulation

@booklet{EasyChair:5206,
  author    = {Jenni Rekola and Miikka Jaurola and Mikko Valtee},
  title     = {Simulation Tool to Analyze the Productivity and Energy Consumption of Electric Mining Vehicles},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 5206},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}