Production
Calculate haul truck cycle time
Break the round trip into loading, travel, dumping, return and queue time.
Published by Mine-Pro · Surface mining operations and recordkeeping
Measure the full cycle
A truck that spends four minutes loading, seven hauling, two dumping, six returning and one waiting needs 20 minutes per cycle. Ignoring queue or spotting time inflates the expected loads per shift.
Use realistic productive hours
Subtract planned breaks and expected delays from shift length before estimating output. If trucks share one loader, independent per-truck estimates may overstate the fleet's capacity.
In practice
With a 20-minute cycle, one truck has a theoretical three cycles per productive hour, before system constraints.