In recent years, commodity prices have swiftly decreased, narrowing the profit margin for many mining operations and forcing them to find effective cost management strategies to respond to low prices. Given that equipment is one of the most significant assets of a mining company, efficient equipment utilization has strong potential to reduce costs. This paper focuses on the relationship between the number of available drilling machines based on reliability analysis and the number of holes to be created on a bench of an open pit mining operation. Since equipment availability is random in nature, a range of holes to be drilled corresponding to a specified probability level was determined. To assess the performance of the proposed approach, a case study was carried out using two stochastic modeling techniques. Evolutions of reliabilities of 10 rotary drilling machines over a specific time were simulated by Markov chain Monte Carlo and mean reverting processes, using historical data. Multiple simulations were then used for risk quantification. Results show that the proposed approach can be used as a tool to assist production scheduling and assess the associated risk.

中文翻译：

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通过马尔可夫链蒙特卡罗和均值恢复过程模拟对采矿钻井作业进行基于可靠性的性能分析

近年来，大宗商品价格迅速下跌，收窄了许多采矿业务的利润率，迫使他们寻找有效的成本管理策略来应对低价。鉴于设备是矿业公司最重要的资产之一，有效利用设备具有降低成本的巨大潜力。本文重点研究基于可靠性分析的可用钻机数量与露天采矿作业台架上钻孔数量之间的关系。由于设备可用性本质上是随机的，因此确定了与指定概率水平相对应的要钻探的范围。为了评估所提出方法的性能，使用两种随机建模技术进行了案例研究。马尔可夫链蒙特卡罗和均值回复过程使用历史数据模拟了 10 台旋挖钻机在特定时间内的可靠性演变。然后使用多次模拟进行风险量化。结果表明，所提出的方法可用作辅助生产调度和评估相关风险的工具。