The simulation of a manganese railway siding facility

Abstract

ITE consulting takes pride in providing a proposal to evaluate and confirm the design parameters and operational philosophy of the rail siding operations near the manganese mines at Lohatla. The client, a logistics company, has been contracted by a mining company to assist with the export of Manganese ore from various mines in the Lohatla region. The client will be provided with one train from Transnet Freight Rail daily and their contractual arrangement is to have a turnaround time of not more than 12 hours. They need confirmation that their proposed layout will achieve this objective. Because the data supplied by the customer didn’t include any variation, different sets of data were used in the simulation. The first set excluded any variation, whilst the second set of inputs included added randomness. This ensures that the simulation is a better representation of the real world where variation is common. Outputs from both sets of inputs were analysed and compared before recommendations were made. Whilst simulating the Manganese Railway Siding Facility, a bottle neck was identified at the weighbridge. This bottleneck made it impossible to achieve a train turnaround time of less than 12 hours. After analysing all results obtained from the simulation done in Arena, it is recommended that the weigh time at the weighbridge be decreased to 5 minutes or less, or a second weighbridge be installed. Either of the proposed solutions would enable the system to produce a train turnaround time of less than 12 hours.