A practical simulation approach for an effective truck dispatching system of open pit mines using VBA

Material handling is one of the most important operations carried out in open pit mines. According to previous studies, it accounts for approximately 50% of total operating costs. As a means of reducing the operating cost, it is important to allocate and dispatch the trucks efficiently. Although optimizing the necessary number of trucks assigned to transportation and hauling is an important issue in the operation of open pit mines, in practice, creating a reasonable truck dispatching control table is more beneficial. In this paper, we propose a practical simulation modeling approach enhanced by VBA programing to achieve an effective truck dispatching system in an open pit mine. We present a case study in an open pit mine, where we implement an algorithm with VBA to determine the best allocation of trucks to meet a particular grade and achieve stable production.