>>13413215I don't know much about mining.
Depends on how complex the operation is. At the simplest level it would be: collect rocks and put it on the truck, truck leaves to dump the rocks and comes back for more. The truck and excavators would always be pretty much at the right place because that's all marked with signs.
After that you are only trying to optimize more complex variations:
How many trucks should I have so each truck and excavator is used the most possible?
How fast should trucks move so that the excavator is always busy (but if they move too fast it's more fuel expended for nothing)?
Those questions are called "problem constraints" and the area of mathematics that studies this kind of problems is called linear programming (optimizing systems of inequalities). It's very useful for industrial applications and also used for stuff like power grids.
I find it very fun, and you only need basic linear algebra to get started.
That said those questions would all be answered ahead of time and you would only need to plug the results in the software and tell it to keep the system within an error margin of the parameters.
>if truck A slows down a bit, make the excavator slow down too then accelerate truck A againEventually you might hit systems of differential equations, which leads you to the broader field of operational research. You need a bit more math to get started but it's also very fun.
