Maintenance scheduling of earth moving equipment at the Klipspruit colliery

Abstract

An investigative study of BHP billiton's Klipspriut colliery is done to deter-mine the best design for a maintenance workshop that services track and tyre based ). The workshop is under construction and management requires a design that will optimise the number of entities and minimize the throughput time of the workshop. There are different factors that infuence the number of entities ranging from warranty commitment to quality of service. By optimizing the throughput of the workshop the mine would have access to more EME's which will result in a more productive mine. The simulation is done with Arena software and is modelled according to a generic model of maintenance systems. The proposed system design through-put is used to measure the theoretical designs productivity. The simulation provides different improvements thus a optimal design can be chosen depending on management's interest. The number of shifts worked on the mine is increased with 33 percent if the bays are divided 3:1 for tyre based services. A 78 percent increase in the productivity is obtained by extending labour from ve days to seven days. This will increase labour cost but will result in a more productive facility.