Optimizing Mine Haulage: Russia Develops AI System for Dump Trucks
Scientists at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), working with OES, have developed an AI system for automatically managing the movement of haul trucks at open-pit mines.
Russian company OES specializes in improving the efficiency of mining operations with the help of AI. The OES.TruckBalance system, developed in partnership with MIPT, enables a shift from traditional manual dispatching to an intelligent decision-making system. At large open-pit mines, hundreds of factors have to be taken into account, including equipment locations, road conditions, vehicle speeds, excavator loading, maintenance work and unexpected events. AI can analyze these parameters much faster than a human dispatcher and automatically generate optimal routes.
One of the strongest examples of the system’s deployment is the Solntsevsky Coal Mine operated by the Eastern Mining Company, where OES.TruckBalance has delivered convincing results since 2025, both economically and organizationally. The system now manages the mine’s entire dump-truck fleet, cutting the workload on dispatchers by 60–70%, reducing truck queue wait times by 30% and significantly reducing excavator downtime caused by a lack of haulage capacity.
The economic benefit from the deployment is estimated at more than 1.5 billion rubles a year (about $17.8 million). Returns have increased as the data have been refined and the system tuned, rising from an initial 6 million rubles a month (about $71,000) to 80 million rubles (about $948,000). At the same time, the mine continues to increase both its operating pace and the volume of material it hauls.
Investing in Industrial Sovereignty
Russia’s experience can be considered highly successful, as only two foreign companies worldwide are known to offer comparable technology solutions. Russian developers, meanwhile, needed just three months to build the project virtually from scratch.
The emergence of such systems in mining is a breakthrough development. Mining is one of the most resource-intensive sectors of the economy, where even a modest improvement in equipment utilization can generate substantial savings. AI can increase production volumes without a proportional increase in spending on new equipment. The industry itself is strategically important to Russia’s economy. For that reason, the technology has particular significance for the country’s industrial sovereignty.
The next stage in the system’s development will be a shift from intelligent dispatching to fully autonomous open-pit mining operations. To achieve that, the system must be integrated with other digital platforms covering equipment maintenance, geological modeling, industrial Internet of Things systems and autonomous machinery. This would allow AI not only to assign equipment to different sites but also to control dump-truck movements without human intervention.
An Industry Going Digital
Automation of mining equipment in Russia began with the introduction of dispatching systems. Those systems collected data on vehicle locations; now, the systems can analyze the situation themselves.
In 2024, Zyfra introduced a technology for robotizing mining dump trucks that made it possible to modernize existing equipment and prepare it for autonomous operation. The approach used the existing fleet without requiring a complete replacement of equipment.
Building on that work, in 2026 Zyfra introduced a new version of its mining transportation management system, Zyfra.Kar'er 26 (Zyfra.Quarry 26). The updated platform added AI tools, new automation modules and additional mechanisms to improve fault tolerance. The system is now used at more than 75 industrial enterprises.
Autonomous transport technologies have also become a separate area of research for Russian scientific organizations. Experts note that autonomous mining dump trucks require a range of challenges to be addressed, including building digital maps, managing vehicle movement, maintaining reliable communications and processing large volumes of data.
MIPT is also building its own expertise in AI and intelligent transportation. Its departments are developing transportation control systems, machine-learning technologies and data-processing technologies for industrial applications. The development of OES.TruckBalance shows that AI is gradually becoming a tool for managing real industrial processes, rather than serving only as an analytical system.
