Simulation of a transport system in a hard coal mine

The article presents activities related to the construction of a simulation model for the operation of a hard coal mine. The direct goal of the simulation is to analyze so-called “bottlenecks” and propose actions aimed at improving the company’s operation as a whole, with particular emphasis on the transport system, understood in terms of transporting employees “to” and “from” their workstations, transporting excavated material, and properly synchronizing these activities.The transport system plays a significant role regardless of whether it is considered locally, at the plant level, or on a global scale, ensuring the proper functioning of cooperating companies. The complexity of the transport system (TS) in a hard coal mine offers great opportunities for optimizing its operation.
This, however, requires a thorough analysis of the current state and the determination of mutual relationships between the elements forming the informational and physical structure of the system. A very good tool that facilitates the search for solutions aimed at improving the operation of the TS, and thereby improving the operation of the entire company, is computer simulation, which can act as a quasi-optimization [2].
In many cases, achieving profitability for mining plants is possible through the concentration of extraction and equipping longwall complexes with high-performance equipment. In the analyzed example, after implementing such modifications, three longwall crews extract the same amount of coal annually as eight crews did in the 1980s. (…)

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