A survey of scheduling problems with setup times or costs

The first comprehensive survey paper on scheduling problems with separate setup times or costs was conducted by Allahverdi et al. (1999), who reviewed the literature since the mid-1960s. Since the appearance of that survey paper, there has been an increasing interest in scheduling problems with setup times (costs) with an average of more than 40 papers per year being added to the literature. The objective of this paper is to provide an extensive review of the scheduling literature on models with setup times (costs) from then to date covering more than 300 papers. Given that so many papers have appeared in a short time, there are cases where different researchers addressed the same problem independently, and sometimes by using even the same technique, e.g., genetic algorithm. Throughout the paper we identify such areas where independently developed techniques need to be compared. The paper classifies scheduling problems into those with batching and non-batching considerations, and with sequence-independent and sequence-dependent setup times. It further categorizes the literature according to shop environments, including single-machine, parallel machines, flow shop, no-wait flow shop, flexible flow shop, job shop, open shop, and others.