Coordinated Production Planning and Scheduling Problem in a Foundry

In the paper, we present a coordinated production planning and scheduling problem for three major shops in a typical alloy casting foundry, i.e. a melting shop, molding shop with automatic line and a core shop. The castings, prepared from different metal, have different weight and different number of cores. Although core preparation does not required as strict coordination with molding plan as metal preparation in furnaces, some cores may have limited shelf life, depending on the material used, or at least it is usually not the best organizational practice to prepare them long in advance. Core shop have limited capacity, so the cores for castings that require multiple cores should be prepared earlier. We present a mixed integer programming model for the coordinated production planning and scheduling problem of the shops. Then we propose a simple Lagrangian relaxation heuristic and evolutionary based heuristic to solve the coordinated problem. The applicability of the proposed solution in industrial practice is verified on large instances of the problem with the data simulating actual production parameters in one of the medium size foundry.