Production Scheduling for the Two Furnaces – One Casting Line System

The paper presents a production scheduling problem in a foundry equipped with two furnaces and one casting line, where the line is a bottleneck and furnaces, of the same capacity, work in parallel. The amount of produced castings may not exceed the capacity of the line and the furnaces, and their loads determine metal type from which the products are manufactured on the casting line. The purpose of planning is to create the processing order of metal production to prevent delays in the delivery of the ordered products to the customers. The problem is a mix of a lot-sizing and scheduling problems on two machines (the furnaces) run in parallel. The article gives a mathematical model that defines the optimization problem, and its relaxed version based on the concept of a rolling-horizon planning. The proposed approaches, i.e. commercial solver and Iterated Local Search (ILS) heuristic, were tested on a sample data and different problem sizes. The tests have shown that rolling horizon approach gives the best results for most problems, however, developed ILS algorithm gives better results for the largest problem instances with tight furnace capacity.