Reliability Analysis of Mining Transportation System: A Comparative Study of Semi-Parametric and Parametric Proportional Hazard Models

With recent technological developments in the mining industry, the issue of physical asset management has become more important. Asset management in the mining industry has a key role to achieve production goals and increase competitiveness in the market. Reliability is one of the key indicators of asset management. Reliability is a function of the failures time and various risk factors such as environmental and operational conditions. One of the most widely used methods for investigating the relationship between the risk factors and reliability is the proportional hazard regression model. The regression coefficients can be estimated using two approaches, i.e. parametric and semi-parametric. In this paper, the failure data of a dump truck in the Sungun copper mine is analyzed using both semi-parametric and parametric approaches. The results show that the obtained estimates of both approaches were close to each other, according to Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), the Weibull parametric model is more efficient than the semi-parametric model at describing the reliability and hazard rate. In addition, it is found that road condition; operator skill, ambient temperature, and haulage distance have a significant effect on the hazard rate of the dump truck. This analysis is applied to maintenance management to keep the reliability of the dump truck at an acceptable level.