Optimal Inspection and Preventive Maintenance Scheduling of Mining Equipment

A typical mining company has three important assets: the human labor-force, the orebody, and the equipment. Trucks, excavators, drilling machines, crushers, grinders, classifiers, and concentrators represent the equipment. Mining operations that want to take advantage of economies of scale have huge equipment fleet, and the worth of the equipment could be more than a hundred million dollars. The reliability and availability of this equipment play critical roles in increasing the efficiency and productivity of a mining operation. This paper proposes an effective maintenance management approach to be used in the mining industry such that equipment availability and reliability are improved while potential failures are prevented. Using failure data of a mining truck fleet in an open-pit Canadian mining operation, a case study is conducted in two steps. The first step focuses on determining optimal inspection intervals based on the desired reliability level in such a way as to detect potential catastrophic failures that represent considerable maintenance and downtime costs. The second step develops a preventive maintenance scheduling plan that differentiates between physical and virtual age considering the degradation of systems and their rejuvenation after each repair. The research outcomes show that the proposed approach has the potential to increase the benefit obtained from the mining equipment and can be used in mining operations.