Development of Truck Dispatching Mobile Application in Open Pit Mine: Case Study of Dangote Cement, Obajana, Kogi State

"Muhammed, K. Salawu O. M and Bida A. D.

Department of Mineral and Petroleum Engineering, College of Engineering, Kaduna Polytechnic, Kaduna

Keywords: Fleet management, dispatch, cycle time, open-pit, truck-dispatch, mobile application.

Abstract

Truck haulage is the most common means of conveying ore/waste in open pit mining operations. It is usually the costliest unit of operation in a truck-shovel open pit mine. In this study, a mobile application is designed with the utmost purpose to track, direct and record cycle time. The application was designed with MIT APP INVENTOR, the app developer allows the creation of User Interface (UI) and programming the interface by connecting a computer with the MIT APP INVENTOR opened in a browser linked to an emulator for testing. The interface was then programmed using the BLOCKS EDITOR that has two blocks; the first block called EVENT HANDLER gives specification on how a mobile device should respond to a command while the other block COMMAND gives specification on the action to be performed on the interface and the details of the actions. The development of the mobile application enables a tracker installation to monitor trucks and a cloud server to store trucks cycle time involving simplified design of several UI which guide the operators. The first UI is the log-in screen that serves as a security to access the application. The log-in screen is only accessible to the central dispatcher that has access to designate and reschedule dispatch routine.