Seminar: Mehran Samavati, 24th Sept, 1p

When: Thurs 24th of Sept, 1p AEST

Where: This seminar will be presented online, RSVP here.

Speaker: Mehran Samavati

Title: Development of a Material Movement Planning and Optimisation System for Rio Tinto

Abstract: In the surface mining industry, material transportation management coordinates material movement through dynamically allocating trucks to transfer material from dig units to a designated dumping destination. Existing commercial management systems are typically plan-driven, conducting such a truck allocation through executing an established material movement plan. These systems conventionally create such a plan as a set of material flow rates from dig units to dumping destinations. A considerable weakness of these systems is that flow rates are planned instantaneously without having an awareness of the upcoming events throughout the planning horizon. This causes three primary issues: 1) the systems heavily rely on human dispatch operators to be frequently run across the planning horizon, 2) they completely rely on human operator to react to disruptions, and 3) instantaneous optimisation does not guarantee that the plan is globally optimal for the entire planning horizon. The Rio Tinto Centre for Mine Automation has been working on developing an optimisation algorithm-based software system to address these issues.

Bio: Mehran competed his PhD in Operations Research from UNSW in 2017. His PhD research focus was long-term production scheduling in surface mining. He joined RTCMA in Feb 2017 and has been working on Asset Optimisation for Rio Tinto since then.