A Decision Support System for Operations Planning of a Reconfigurable Vibrating Screen Machine in a Volatile Market

Sporadic change in mineral concentrate demand, and the need to recover production losses that emanate during machine maintenance unveiled a new Reconfigurable Vibrating Screen (RVS) machine design. Therefore, it is vital to ascertain which configuration the machine ought to be set up to, at different time spans in order to fulfil varying mineral concentrates demand and recover production losses owing to machine maintenance. Therefore, there is a need to develop a knowledge advisor that guide the users of the RVS machine on how to configure the machine properly, and on the reconfiguration time of the machine in order to fulfil varying mineral concentrate demand and recover production losses owing to machine maintenance. In light of this, this study propose a decision support system that automatically advice RVS Machine users on how to configure the machine properly, the machine reconfiguration time and the inventory spare details that is required to reconfigure the machine, towards meeting new mineral concentrate demand and recovering production losses. The developed decision support system was tested using the historical maintenance time record of a component that could fail in the machine and an assumed mineral concentrate demand quantity. The result of the decision support system evaluation exercise revealed that the time it will take to recover a production loss of 31.5 h and meet mineral concentrate demand of 8500 tons of the granite, when the machine is set up to operate at configuration capacity size of 4700 mm × 2500 mm machine screening capacity is 75.9941 h.