THE PLANT LAYOUT OF A FOUNDRY: CONSTRAINTS, OPERATIVE GUIDELINES AND A CASE STUDY

The problem of studying a plant layout is frequently tackled in literature. Nevertheless, approaches specifically dedicated to predefined market fields are rare. Usually, methodologies available for a wide variety of companies are studied and adopted, disregarding those details typical of each economical sector. On the contrary, in this paper, customized guidelines for the design of a plant layout of a foundry are proposed, in order to support such a critical productive environment where automated equipment, characteristic of Industry 4.0, are integrated with manual activities. Specifically, the casting area is studied. The long term design is supported by a medium term analysis, focused on the products turnover into the casting moulds. The application to a real life case study is finally described in order to assess the performance of the proposed approach.