Production system rationalisation on the example of iron foundry

The present paper presents a systemic approach to foundry management. Thanks to production process modelling and simulation techniques, an attempt was made to synthesis many interconnected devices and numerous manufacturing stages into one production system. In the beginning, a factor analysis was carried out of the research object, which is a system of iron castings manufacture on automated foundry lines. On the basis of a simulation experiment, use the accessible production resources and manufacturing own cost of castings were analysed, depending on batch content and melting order, choice of an automatic line and the model of line fed with cast iron, sequence of order realization and the size of production lots. Simulation experiments were carried out on a computer simulation model prepared in the Arena packet produced by Rockwell Automation. Cost was estimated on the basis of additional calculation according to cost centres basing on factory spreadsheet.