Real-Time Path Planning of Driverless Mining Trains with Time-Dependent Physical Constraints

Abstract

While the increased automation levels of production and operation equipment have led to the improved productivity of mining activity in open pit mines, the capacity of the mine transport system has become a bottleneck. The optimisation of the mine transport system is of great practical significance to reduce the production and operation cost and improve the production and organizational efficiency of mines. In this paper, we first formulate a multiobjective optimisation problem for mine railway scheduling by introducing a set of mathematical constraints. As the problem is NP-hard, we then devise a mixed integer programming-based solution to solve this problem and develop an online framework accordingly. We finally conduct test cases to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution is efficient and able to generate a train schedule in a real-time manner.