My Levels of Queue Visualisation

I'm going to lift the curtain on my way of thinking about truck and shovel queues.

We will go all the way from nothing to a real time animated solution.

Hope you enjoy it.

Level 0 – AKA Yikes!

You're not even looking at the queue? Ok, this is serious. Keep reading; you might find a good reason to start.

👇 Moving on.

Level 1 - Just Give Me the Numbers

Numbers can tell you a lot. Here, it's clear we have minimal hang time but loads of queue time. What could this mean?

• It could be typical over-trucking—too many trucks.
• Or maybe the excavator was down, causing some sort of issue.

Let’s dig deeper.

Level 2 – The Good Old Picket Fence

What I have done here, is timeboxed the shift into minutes and calculated the number of trucks in queue at load unit and queue at dump.

What can we see?

Hmm, it definitely looks like there’s over-trucking here. We can see the number of trucks in queue at the loader is consistently high throughout the shift.

Side note: There also appears to be dump congestion in the second half as well.

Let’s focus on the queue at the loader— Now I really want to see the load unit downtimes and understand their impact.

Level 3 – Add Load Unit Context

Ok, as suspected, there is some downtime.

Let’s get this into one chart to make it easier to see, here is my “go to” chart below.

Yep, you can clearly see the queue rebuild on the second downtime.

The first and third downtimes are less prominent, likely impacted by dump congestion combine with Travel empty.

You could stop here, because it is very clear there are too many trucks on this circuit.

However! I wanted to share some other potential visuals - so Let's do It.

Let’s add the excavator activities, just for good measure.

Ok, now we can see the hang time was start of shift – it highlights potential (minimal in this case) for staggered shifts and load unit hot swap.

Next, I’ll bring in the distros to triple (quadruple?) confirm the over trucking.

Level 4 – Bring in Distros

Here is a quick visualisation of Queue Distributions.

Yeh, it's bad lol.

It might help to compare this to a properly under trucked circuit below for context.

You can see the distribution is much much tighter and queue time are significantly less in the under trucked circuit.

Level 5 – Go Nuts.

You want moooooooaaaaaaaar!

I'm cool with that 😎

Queue Hang - Plus Minus chart - Over Trucked Example

Queue Hang - Plus Minus chart. - Example of under-trucked for reference.

Truck states over time. What every truck was doing, every minute of the shift.

Load Queue by truck Vis. The lighter greens on each section are the queuing, the darker are the loading.

First let's see over trucked (ie crazy mine 😉)

Now under trucked Load Queue. Very nice.

Now same for dumps, light reds queue, dark red dump.

Dump Congestion big time.

Now Minimal Dump Congestion

Boss Level – Real-time it all

This is just showing off, but here is my take on real time circuit animation.

Also, if you got this far, thanks for reading! If you want to have a chat about mining\data or productivity - just drop me a DM here on linked-in.

Now the video.

P.S - These custom reports are from our Connected Mine product - www.inapl.com - Information Alignment - check us out if you want to release yourself from data hell - and make visualisations like above a breeze. 😁

P.S.S - ⛏ My name is Harry Finn

🔷Elevating miners with next-level mining technology

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