Accurate costing of mining equipment

Abstract

When performing equipment selection, we can best account for the operating cost by considering the number of hours that the equipment has been utilised. In a surface mine, equipment is often not utilised to full capacity and not accounting for this difference may lead to inferior solutions. Generally, the cost of operating equipment depends on the age of that equipment, while the decision to use a piece of equipment or not is based on the cost. This co-dependency of the age and utilisation of the equipment has so far provided a barrier to tractable equipment selection models. In the mining industry, it is a common practice to discretise both the age of the equipment and the current time into..