Authors:
Gabriel Icarte Ahumada
1
;
2
and
Otthein Herzog
3
;
4
;
5
Affiliations:
1
Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Arturo Prat University - UNAP, Iquique, Chile
;
2
International Graduate School for Dynamics in Logistics (IGS), University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
;
3
Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
;
4
Tongji University Shanghai, China
;
5
University of Bremen, Germany
Keyword(s):
Truck Dispatching, Open-pit Mine, Multiagent Systems, Tabu Search, Scheduling, Rescheduling.
Abstract:
An important and complex process in the mining industry is the material handling process. In this process, trucks must transport materials extracted by shovels to different places at the mine. To enable efficient material handling processes, the decision on the destination of a truck is crucial. Currently, this process is supported by an approach based on centralized systems that apply dispatching criteria. A disadvantage of this approach is not providing a precise dispatching solution because of missing knowledge about potentially changed external conditions and the dependency on a central node. We previously developed a multiagent system (MAS-TD) to solve this problem. In the MAS-TD, intelligent agents that represent real-world equipment interact with each other to generate schedules. In this paper, we evaluate the MAS-TD by comparing it against a Tabu Search procedure. In the evaluation, simulated scenarios based on actual data from a Chilean open-pit mine were used. The results s
how that both MAS-TD and the Tabu Search procedure are suitable methods to solve the truck dispatching problem in open-pit mines. However, the schedules generated by MAS-TD are more efficient than the schedules generated by the Tabu Search.
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