Improving Safety in Hauling Operations: Predicting and Analyzing Collision Probabilities with Discrete Event Simulation

Ensuring safety in off-highway raw material handling systems is critical, as the high risk of truck collisions poses a significant threat to both human lives and mining equipment, leading to costly damages. While various safety and risk assessment methods exist—such as probabilistic models (e.g., Fault Tree Analysis), reliability-based models (e.g., Failure Mode and Effect Analysis), simulation-based models (e.g., Agent-Based Models), and incident analysis frameworks (e.g., Tripod)—most struggle to capture the complexity of dynamic traffic interactions. These methods often lack the flexibility to accurately model real-world conditions and require substantial computational resources, making them impractical for real-time applications. This study proposes a discrete-event simulation (DES) approach, which provides a time-based simulation of discrete events and effectively manages randomness, process interactions, and resource constraints. DES can outperform static or probabilistic models in simulating truck traffic flow and conducting real-time accident analysis, offering a more practical solution for operational safety studies compared to high-level systemic or agent-based models. The proposed model simulates truck movements across a road network that reflects a realistic mine layout. The model then develops and evaluates various collision scenarios while capturing real-time truck interactions throughout the entire road network. The simulation modeling was performed using the OpenCLSim, an open-source library for rule-driven scheduling and comparison of cyclic logistics strategies. The results highlight areas and locations on the road network with high collision probability, particularly mid-road and junction locations. Based on these high-risk areas, different operational scenarios, along with dynamic shove-truck allocation and scheduling, can help enhance safety and decrease the probability of collisions. Furthermore, additional enhancements, including signage, speed limits, adaptive traffic control and automated vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems, are recommended to improve driver responses to changing road conditions and congestion, offering a flexible and computationally efficient approach to safety management.

Keywords: Hauling operations, Discrete-event simulation, Traffic flow safety, Collision probability, Mitigation measure, Mining truck.