Analysis of Maintenance Service Contracts for Dump Trucks Used in Mining Industry with Simulation Approach

Abstract

A mining company needs high availability of dump trucks used to haul mining materials. As a result, an effective maintenance action is required to keep the dump trucks in a good condition and hence reducing failure and downtime of the dump trucks. To carry out maintenance in-house requires a high intensive maintenance facility and high skilled maintenance specialists. Often, outsourcing maintenance is an economic option for the company. An external agent takes a proactive action with offering some maintenance contract options to the owner. The decision problem for the owner is to decide the best option and for the agent is to determine the optimal price for each option offered. A non-cooperative game-theory is used to formulate the decision problems for the owner and the agent. We consider that failure pattern of each truck follows a non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP) and a queueing theory with multiple servers is used to estimate the downtime. As it involves high complexity to model downtime using a queueing theory, then in this paper we use a simulation method. Furthermore, we conduct experiment to seek for the best number of maintenance facilities (servers) which minimises maintenance and penalty costs incurred to the agent.