Towards Modeling Changeovers for flexible foundry manufacturing

Costs involved in implementing manufacturing flexibility to meet customer demand are more important in the SMEs, especially that are labor intensive for example metalcasting companies located in a high cost country like Norway. Changeover is an important issue in foundries, and setup time of the dies is one of the vital parameters in the manufacturing process. This paper presents an analytical method for evaluating product changeover suitable for foundry manufacturing environment.