Road benchmarking
&
improvement (CI) campaigns

Once the design life of a haul road expires, or when road maintenance becomes excessive, this indicates one or more design elements have failed and a rehabilitation or roads campaign is required.

Often, with an increase in truck size or traffic volume, there is also a need to consider a road upgrade to cater for this change without compromising road performance or safety.

Re-design or rehabilitation will depend to a large extent on the end-user requirements, together with existing road sub-grade, layerworks and wearing course condition and suitability. It is important to review all these elements to assess how they meet the newly-defined requirements, prior to determining the scope and potential value-add of a campaign.

For informed road maintenance and management decision-making, and to evaluate the value proposition for any road remediation, some basis of comparison should be established to compare segments of the the mine haul road network.

A comparison can be based on road functional defects from which an immediate assessment of rolling resistance can be found - and when coupled with a truck productivity data, enables the impact of rolling resistance to be determined both cost- and time-wise.

The cost-benefit ratio can then be determined for each segment, to identify which segments of the network should enjoy priority in any upgrade or re-design .

A maintenance management systems approach for mine roads identifies the optimal frequency of maintenance (routine grading) for each segment in a haul road network, thus maintenance can be planned, scheduled and prioritised for optimal road performance at the lowest overall (truck operating and road maintenance) cost per ton hauled.

This is especially important where road maintenance assests are scarce and need to be used to best effect. The approach also serves to identify 'maintenance-sensitive' segments, either by virtue of poor road performance, or high contributory costs. These segments will typically show the greatest return on any road improvement investments.