This article describes the conception, development, and application of a methodology for the production scheduling in the foundry industry. There are two important and related situations involved, which are the furnace scheduling and the molding machine scheduling. The problem consists in determining an adequate sequencing of production orders in the molding line combining light weight parts with medium and heavy parts in order to obtain a constant demand of molten metal balanced with the offer of furnace derived metal. The heuristic approach was chosen to find a solution to the problem, and using fuzzy logic technique, which allows modeling complex systems using a higher level of abstraction originating from knowledge and experience identified in a qualitative research. The results demonstrated, besides the benefits of the knowledge systematization and the capacity to run quick simulations in order to find the best alternatives to a solution, a more efficient performance than that obtained by the foundry professionals.
Competitiveness; Production scheduling; Heuristic; Fuzzy logic; Foundry industry
