Seminar: Konstantin Seiler, 9th Sept, 2p

When: Weds 9th of Sept, 2p AEST

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

Speaker: Dr Konstantin Seiler

Title: Flow-achieving online planning and dispatching for open cut mines

Abstract: In open cut mining, ore must be continuously transported between locations, which in the absence of conveyor systems is by a fleet of individual vehicles. Here I present an online dispatching algorithm which allows vehicles to efficiently operate as a team to maximise the system’s throughput while meeting a production schedule. A high-performance model is developed for high-fidelity prediction of vehicle interactions and system performance. It is subsequently optimised using a variant of Monte Carlo Tree Search to make agile dispatch decisions in real-time. The method is validated using an examples from iron ore mining and is shown to outperform a commonly used algorithm in this domain.

Bio: Konstantin graduated from the University of Freiburg, Germany with an undergrad degree in Mathematics & Computer Science. He finished his PhD at the ACFR in 2014 on the topic of using Lie Group operation for fast corrective motion planning. 2014-2015 he was postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland working on optimisation methods for POMDPs. He has been Research Fellow at the Rio Tinto Centre for Mine Automation since 2015, and became theme lead for the “Asset Optimisation” projects in 2020.