Hydraulic shovel excavators are widely used as primary production equipment in surface mining for removing overburden and ore materials. Variability in material diggability, unstructured mining environments and limited space, effective machine operation, and machine logistics affect the performance of the hydraulic shovel excavators. A hydraulic shovel simulator is developed to simulate the performance of hydraulic shovels for oil sands extraction in the ADAMS simulation environment. The shovel-oil sands interaction is simulated using a reformulated universal earth-moving model. The simulated digging parameters include the bucket dynamics, oil sands properties, oil sands-bucket interactions, and operating variables. The results show that the simulator is capable for identifying the parameters, which influence the performance of hydraulic shovels. This parameterized simulator provides a powerful tool for performance monitoring, excavation process designs and structural optimization of hydraulic excavators. The method presented in this paper forms the basis for developing comprehensive simulator models for automated shovel operations in constrained mining environments.