A review and classification of heuristics for permutation flow-shop scheduling with makespan objective

Makespan minimisation in permutation flow shop scheduling is an OR topic that has been intensively addressed in the last 40 years. Since the problem is known to be NPcomplete for more than two machines, most of the research effort has been devoted to the development of heuristic procedures in order to provide good approximate solutions to the problem. However, little attention has been devoted to establish a common framework for these heuristics so they can be effectively combined or extended. In this paper, we review and classify the main contributions regarding this topic and discuss future research issues. 1 Industrial Management, School of Engineering, University of Seville, Spain. Email: [email protected] 2 Department of Management, Ball State University, USA. 3 Production Management, Institute for Logistics and Information Management, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, University of Duisburg, Germany.