Dispatch control of a fleet of remote-controlled/automatic load-haul-dump vehicles in underground mines

Recently, a concept for automating load-haul-dump (LHD) vehicles has stimulated considerable interest in the world mining industry. In this concept, the tramming and dumping operations of an LHD should be automatic. During loading, an operator from a control room fills the bucket of a vehicle via remote-control aided by a television system. The application of such a remote-controlled/automatic LHD (RAL) system in underground mines exhibits some operational and traffic control characteristics that have not been studied previously in mining (e.g. vehicle motion in bidirectional lane-segments, lack of alternative routes to the same destination, stochastic nature of an RAL system due to human involvement in the loading operation). This paper presents and discusses a dispatch and traffic control procedure for a fleet of RAL vehicles operating in an underground mining transport layout. The development of this procedure has been based on concepts in graph theory.