How to Use Road Condition Data to Prioritise Haul Road Maintenance
A heat map does not make the maintenance decision for you. It shows where the network is deteriorating. The maintenance decision comes from combining condition, deterioration trend and operational importance to decide what should be fixed first.
For a definition of the measurement itself, see What is haul road condition monitoring?. What follows is how teams use the data once they have it.
Condition is not the same as priority
A poor condition measurement may matter. It does not automatically jump the queue. Traffic, production requirements, access constraints and supervisor judgement still decide what gets the grader tonight. Road Condition Monitoring shows where the surface is slipping. It does not rank jobs for you.
1. Detect
Start with the sections that are deteriorating on the travelled network. Heat maps and section-level data show where the running surface is rough or getting worse, including roads that did not generate a complaint this week.
Detection is not diagnosis. If a section looks poor, someone still needs to decide whether the cause is grading, drainage, material or something else. That is an inspection or engineering call, not a dashboard output.
2. Compare
Compare severity, trend and nearby sections before locking a work order. A road that is merely poor but stable is a different problem from a main haul that dropped in a few shifts.
Road Score is useful here as a consistent summary: one section against another, and one period against the last. It is not a substitute for looking at the heat map, and it is not a universal industry standard.
3. Prioritise
Prioritisation is the human step. Teams typically weigh:
- how poor the section is now
- whether it is still falling
- how much production traffic it carries
- what else is already queued, including safety and drainage work
Proof does not currently apply an automated priority algorithm that folds traffic, production or weather into a single ranked list. The data informs the conversation. Superintendents still set the order.
4. Allocate
Once priorities exist, they inform grader and maintenance deployment: which machine, which road, and how much of the shift should be spent there rather than on habit jobs.
Allocation is still an operational decision. Condition data can stop a grader being sent to a road that looks busy but is already in acceptable condition, or to a famous bad section that is not the one slipping this week.
5. Verify
After the work, measure the same section again. Did condition improve, stay flat, or keep falling? That is the step most sites skip when they only have inspections and engine hours.
Verification is also where Grader Performance Monitoring earns its place. RCM can show that a road is still poor. GPM can show whether a grader actually worked it.
How RCM and GPM close the loop
RCM
Where does maintenance appear to be needed?
GPM
Where did the grader actually work?
RCM after the work
Did condition improve?
That is a maintenance feedback loop, not a fully automated control system. People still inspect, task and accept the work. The data makes those steps visible.
For how blade-down time and engine hours differ, see why engine hours are not enough to measure grader productivity.
What that workflow looks like in the field
The EX221 dig-floor study is a compact example of detect then verify. Site management used RCM data to identify 700 m of poor dig-floor, repaired it in two hours, and recorded Road Score moving from 63.79% to 79.13% on that section. Speed, cycle time and tonnes moved also changed in that study; those figures sit on the case study page.
At network scale, the Western Australia lithium mine trial compared a baseline week with a follow-up week after RCM-informed maintenance. Average truck speed rose 6.6 km/h and overall Road Score rose 5.2%. Some sections improved more than others; a few still needed work. That is what a real priority list looks like: not every road moves the same amount.
Both are published Proof Engineers results from those sites. They illustrate the workflow. They do not mean the same numbers will appear on the next mine.
Build a maintenance baseline from your road data
Proof Engineers can walk through how condition data would be collected on your haul network and used to set a baseline before the next maintenance cycle.
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