Traditional Dispatching Limitations in Open-Pit Mining
If you've ever walked into the dispatch center of a large open-pit mine, you've seen the same setup: screens with a map, a radio, a logbook, and a person trying to hold the balance between the plan and reality. The model took shape decades ago and, to its credit, it works.
But it runs on people more than it runs on systems. Every experienced dispatcher develops their own logic — their own priorities, their own habits. When they leave, it turns out the knowledge wasn't in the system. It was in their head.
Traditional dispatching is reactive by nature. A truck stops — reroute it. An excavator sits idle — find someone to send over. Honest work, but almost entirely made up of fighting fires that didn't have to start.
The advantages are real: battle-tested, familiar, understood by everyone on the floor. But the disadvantages compound with scale. Losses spread across small things — no single one looks critical, but added up over a year, the number is uncomfortable.
When a model hits its ceiling, something has to change.