Scheduling the World’s Largest Fully-Owned and Integrated Iron Ore Supply Chain

In the Pilbara Region of Western Australia, Rio Tinto owns and operates the largest fully-owned and integrated bulk supply chain in the world, producing and exporting 1 million tons of iron ore per day to steel mills around the globe.

The Integrated Scheduling team based in Perth is at the heart of this operation, making thousands of complex mine, rail, and port decisions every day.Over the last two decades the operation has almost tripled in size, making it more difficult to schedule efficiently with increasingly dated systems. Rio Tinto decided to embark on a journey to replace their dated, mission-critical systems with a modern and scalable AI scheduling platform.

The Future Scheduling Platform is the first major step in this modernization journey, enabling a dedicated team of 50 schedulers to make optimal rail and port scheduling and execution decisions. Key elements of this solution include:

• A modern user interface to understand current state of operations, review algorithm recommendations and make critical decisions
• Advanced algorithms that leverage machine learning, optimization, simulation and heuristics to optimize scheduling decisions around total value
• Real-time data from hundreds of source systems to provide a live view of the operation
• Reimagined core scheduling processes and ways of working
• An internal digital team recruited, trained, and enabled to improve the platform over time

This new platform has already resulted in a significant production uplift and more than doubled scheduler productivity, paying back the investment in less than 3 months. The success of the Future Scheduling Platform and the innovative partnership with BCG X have set the foundation for future work across Rio Tinto where similar AI techniques can be used to help its people make better decisions.

CONTACT
Erik Ekevall , Andy Heaton, and Rohin Wood