Foundry planning optimization: a decision support tool for a real-world case

We address the real case of a large-scale market-driven and captive company in Brazil, with a particular focus on the production planning of its foundry sector. The situation involves a wide range of item types produced from different alloy types, and capacitated furnaces and production lines. Given the internal and external demand of each item type over a specific time horizon, the company aims to determine which and how many items to produce and store each day, while minimizing total inventory and the number of setups required. To represent and solve this problem, we introduce a novel optimization model and incorporate it into a decision-support tool. We are not aware of any other solution approach that encompasses all the specificities of the studied company. Computational experiments using real-world data provided by the company indicate that our approach is an effective tool for supporting efficient planning in the foundry sector.