Why autonomous assets are good for reliability-the impact of 'operator-related component' failures on heavy mobile equipment reliability

Abstract

This study examines the maintenance records for componentsnecessary for the comfort and safety of the operators of heavymobile equipment. The results show that air conditioners,ladders, driver's seats and mirrors and other requiredoperator-related components can have a significant impact onan asset's reliability. Analysis was conducted on 10 years ofwork orders for five identical 1400HP shovels and threeidentical 1470HP shovels. The results suggest that removingoperator-related components contribute to a 15% decrease inthe number of work orders and an 8% increase in reliability.In an autonomous asset these components would not berequired. The key to this analysis is a rule-based expertsystem used to clean more than ten thousand work orders andallocate events to specific sub-systems with associated failuremodes. While the mining industry has moved to autonomoushaul trucks and drills, there are as yet no autonomous shovels.For manufacturers looking at the business case for theseunits, the availability of data on the reliability increase fromremoving the operator-related components will be valuableinformation.