A Surrogate-Based Heuristic for Production Planning Problem of Orders in Small Foundries

Market foundry production processes are characterized by raw materials that feed a furnace that produces metal alloys with limited capacity to meet item order demand. The foundry production system considered here is make-to-order. Although in the literature, production planning does not usually consider items produced as belonging to orders, it is essential to address this specificity. All component items must be produced to fulfill an order. We propose a surrogate-based heuristic (SUBH) to address the production planning problem of orders in small foundries. The quality of the lower bounds is compared to that of the linearly relaxed problem. The feasibility and optimality of the solutions are tested. Most tested instances are proved optimal. We use a procedure based on item weight and order costs to make infeasible solutions feasible. We obtain excellent results with low computational time