Application of Interval Arithmetic to Production Planning in a Foundry

A novel approach for treating the uncertainty about the real levels of finished products during production planning and scheduling process is presented in the paper. Interval arithmetic is used to describe uncertainty concerning the production that was planned to cover potential defective products, but meets customer’s quality requirement and can be delivered as fully valuable products. Interval lot sizing and scheduling model to solve this problem is proposed, then a dedicated version of genetic algorithm that is able to deal with interval arithmetic is used to solve the test problems taken from a real-world example described in the literature. The achieved results are compared with a standard approach in which no uncertainty about real production of valuable castings is considered. It has been shown that interval arithmetic can be a valuable method for modeling uncertainty, and proposed approach can provide more accurate information to the planners allowing them to take more tailored decisions.