The sand-casting process: a meta-heuristic approach for an environment-friendly and profitable scheduling

Sand-casting is a process with a high-environmental impact in terms of both energy consumption and pollution emission. This work presents a meta-heuristic approach for the typical scheduling problem of mid-size sand casting foundries, with the objective to minimise the costs associated with labour, energy and wastes of melted material. Mid-size foundries usually have multiple parallel melting lines, each composed by a rotary and an electric furnace, and a single casting line which is the bottleneck of the process. The proposed approach has been tested on data related to a real industrial case study. Results show that, with respect to the scheduling implemented by the company, the proposed algorithm achieves a 3.2% reduction in emissions and a 4.1% reduction in energy consumption. Furthermore, these environment-friendly results are achieved while also increasing the company's profitability, by reducing total costs of more than 1% on the total revenue.